New Harddrive and Partioning

I have an XPS 1730 with XP Pro, 120 GB 7200 Seagate HDD, and I want to get a second harddrive (I'm also going to up from 2 GB to 4 GB RAM in the next week). I'm looking at this page right now: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...&SpeTabStoreType=&Order=BESTMATCH&srchInDesc=

I do hardcore gaming, for several hours every night. My question is, should I get a second larger drive? Should I RAID? RAID 0 or RAID 1? Do I install XP Pro [32 bit] on both drives? Should I partition the drives for the OS and the rest for files/game files?

Will I experience good speed/rendering if I do say 40 GB for the OS on each drive, and leave the rest to the other files?

Bear in mind, my ultimate goal is to optimize my machine to game and get FPS. Any help is appreciated.

 

Hello? Anyone?

 

Fast HDDs will improve loading times. You have to find the bottleneck for that machine. CPU? GPU? The M1730 has software RAID so the performance increment through RAID 0 won't be much.

 

I'm not a gamer but here's what I'd do if you upgrade to a bigger drive. Get a USB enclosure with it, and download the free Seagate DiscWizard which only works when you have atleast one Seagate drive. Clone your present drive to the new one in the enclosure. Put the new one in and keep the old one as a back up. You can use SDW as a back up app. It's basically the same as Acronis True Image.

Use gparted to adjust your partitions devoting most to D drive.

Make D drive your default My Documents folder using this guide.

PS this is jut what I did when I upgraded my HDD. I use Karen's Replicator to back up/sync my data to a WD Passport.

PSS. I didn't realize the 17" notebooks held 2 HDD. That's cool, You won't need a USB enclosure but can still use SDW.

 

I should point out, I have a 120 GB and a 60 GB WD external HD. They store my backup files (My Documents, games, music, ****, etc.). They are 5400 RPM I believe and USB 2.0. I've had them for about a year now, and they still work great. I think they have lifetime warranties?


@ Andy: The M1730 has software RAID so the performance increment through RAID 0 won't be much.

Can you explain this? I'm not familiar with software RAID, just the idea for two identical HDD's. My GPU and my RAM will be top notch. The processor is a t8300, so I suppose it's a bottleneck. I don't want to overheat it, as it's quite adequate, and I'm undervolting soon.

@ Hiker: I read your link about the moving default XP folders. Thanks, it was interesting. I use two WD passports as well. My main question still remains, however, because I can't seem to find a definite answer. Let me rephrase it: Let's say I get the money and shell it out for another 120 GB 7200 seagate. That makes two identical 120 GB harddrives. Should I split the first one into two 60 GB's, and put OS on one and use other files on the other? 40 GB for the OS?

I see lot of XPS owners with 320 GB RAID-0 and I have to wonder, is all that free space necessary? This is why I'm wondering what is the best way to partition my drives. RAID-0, based on my research, would help the most for gaming, as the RAID-1 seems to be for backup, which I don't need.

 

I guess you could put the OS on one drive and your data on the other but the most you should need for XP is like 40GB and it will still have lots of room to "breathe" That would leave 80GB for your data. (Roughly the same I have) Then use the other to back up everything. and/or store vids which takes up lots of space.

Is your present HDD just C drive?

PS I just "configured" an XPS 1730 it came to nearly $6000! Dream machine.

 

Check out these two links, link 1 and link 2.
The M1730 has an Intel based Software RAID controller. A hardware based raid controller has a separate chipset processor, and does all of the processing work for the data.
On a S/W based RAID system, the system's CPU has to do all the processing work and it does whatever the H/W RAID chipset does, but through software.
You will see a huge performance increase through S/W RAID in synthetic benchmarks (such as HD Tune), but a small 10-15% increase in real-world performance, as compared to the 50-100% increase in real-world performance through H/W RAID.
T8300 is more than enough for gaming, but if you can spare a bit of cash, go for the T9300, which would give you a small increase in the fps of games.
If you have, say an 8800M GTX (sli?) and 4GB ram, with a T8300/T9300, you won't see much of an improvement in games other than good loading times.
You can try out RAID 0, but keep an external HDD handy, and keep on backing up your data regularly.

 

I don't know anything about RAID so I'll bow out.

 

Maximum PC did a review on a bunch of different hardware vs chipset (software) RAID setups. It turns out that there really isn't a difference whether you run a soft/hardware RAID as long as your CPU isn't garbage. It also seems like the speed ups were different for each different card/MB, ie. hardware does well in one test but loses out to software in another. I'll try to find the results of the article and scan them in.

The T8300 won't likely be the bottleneck so really there isn't any point in going to the T9300. I do strongly agree though with the loading times, that's all the HDD will do. I also agree that you must back up your data frequently if you decide to run a RAID 0 setup since I'm sure you don't want all of your data to be permanently lost if a drive goes under.

EDIT:

Take note of the real benchmarks (ignoring HDTune) it depends on which RAID setup you use and how those apps work with that RAID setup, for instance, the real benches in RAID 0 did better with the software than the hardware; in RAID 5 though it was exactly the opposite.

 

Thanks for the links and information guys. So I plan to do RAID-0 (for the sake of conversation). Will I have two drives to appear on my computer as C: and D:? ALSO: I have read quite a few quides on partitioning, and it seems as though having a partition on a drive for the OS is a no-brainer, like it'd be stupid not to actually.

@ Andy: you think 40 GB is sufficient? Yes, it will be 8800 GTX sli, and I'm gonna' consider getting 4 GB Kingston RAM HyperX memory, which is apparently faster than normal RAM. I know that I should succumb to the "no more than 85% of the drive is used for files" rule at any one time, as that considerably slows it down and fragments the drive. My Windows folder currently takes up no more than 4 GB, but I know in the past on another system, after a couple years' use, I was occupying 15 gb of space for Windows. I've only used this one for a month.

So once more, I have to ask my original question again: how much space should be free on any one drive/partition to get the best use? Isn't it wasted space after a certain amount of free space? Like let's say I take up 20 GB of space on my second drive (120 GB) for gaming. Is the 100 GB free space overkill? Or is every extra gig gonna' help with loading time? That's the answer I'm after.



So my plan so far is to RAID-0 two 120 GB Seagate 7200 drives. I want to split the partition up on the first one into 40/60 = 40 for OS and 60 free space. The second will have 40/60 (since it has to be same capacity for RAIDing), 40 for apps like Microsoft Office and Photo Editing, and 60 for gaming files. The 60 GB partitions will be in RAID. Does this sound right?


P.S. I just noticed my C: drive only display 104 GB (technically 120 GB) capacity. There's no way I lost 16 GB to other hardware or Media Direct. Anyone know where it went?

 

Bump for some exposure.

 

Okay, so I'm going to wipe my 120 GB drive, and get rid of the Media Direct partition. How big a partition should I need for the OS alone? I've got XP Pro 32-bit, and I don't how much space it takes up with all the other files. I want to make the partition as small as possible without choking off cache space. Since Microsoft is focusing on Vista now, I'm going to assume not many more patches [or any at all?] for XP, and I can use my current system as reference?

On C: drive -

Dell folder - 112 MB
i386 folder - 1.20 GB
Documents and Settings folder - 1.63 GB
MSOCache folder - 367 MB
Drivers folder - 121 MB

[withheld Program files because I believe nothing in there is of significant space from the XP cd - please point out if I'm wrong]

Windows folder - 4.56 GB

So a little less than 8.0 GB? Someone on the first page recommended 40 GB to be safe...isn't this massively excessive? Are there folders I'm not accounting for? Assuming I can install MS Office/IE/etc. on another partition and such. I do have SP3 installed, and WMP 11 installed at this time. I was planning to make the partition no bigger than 15-20 GB.

What do you guys think?

 

I'd agree with your plans using a system partition of 15-20GB. I've got XP-Pro 32-bit, SP3 (retail upgrade on top of an OEM version of XP Home), on a 40GB system partition, and that was way too much; I finally got tired of the wasted space and started using it for data storage as well, thereby blowing my attempt at being disciplined in separating OS from apps/data.

Keep in mind, however, that you should be too miserly with the system partition and, if you end up allocating way too much space to that partition, you can resize the partition - I've used Acronis True Image Home to do this before without any problems.

 

This program you speak of [and I've read about before], does it work fully like wiping it and repartitioning it would? But so you agree what I'm planning is more than legitimate right?

The MSOCache folder I pointed out as well, anyone know what that does? i386?

 

Bump ^. Anyone?