To partition or not to partition

[13owman]

That is my ? actually I have two 500 gig drives with Raid 1 and partitioned in to 4 drives so with that I put 3 OS's on, XP_32, XP_64 & Vista_64 and the last drive I put my games on. then I have 3 150 Gig drives on a Raid 5 that I use to store all my other crap, My ? is would I get better performance if I just put all my crap on the mirrored Raid 1 and got rid of the Raid 5 and just put my Operating systems 1 of each of those.

Thanks in advance

My specs are:

DeLL-----------XPS 720 H2C Water cooled
CPU------------Intel Core 2 Quad CPU @ 3.2GHz
MB-Chipset-----nVidia nForce 680i
Graphics--------Dual nVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX
Memory---------4096 MB
Dual------------DVD TSSTcorp DVD+/- R/RW DL
Sound Card-----Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic
Hard Drives-----1 Mirror @ 465 GB/1 Raid 5 @ 298 GB
Montors--------2 Dell UltraSharp 2407WFP-HC 24"1920x1200
Mouse----------G5 Laser Mouse
Logitech KB-----G15 Gaming Keyboard

 

[eyeCpc]

RAID is best seen in server cases and networkin since it is far more fragile then creating separate logical drives. One little gliitch in the file system or one missing file will bring down the entire array seeing everything lost. The same applies for sata arrays too.

With Vista on the only ide drive installed XP is on the first of two 500gb sata models. Later when two more larger sata drives are added one will be for storage/backup while the first will probably see a 64bit Windows and Linux or Solaris there.

The second 500gb model would then likely see the next version after Vista on the multiboot there. But each will have it's own partition without worry of a drive being removed if one should fail.

 

[saltynay]

I would put each OS on its own individual drive so 150gb each and then the 500gb for storage and cross contact. raid1 isn't often used at home environments as it slows down the hdd due to the need to clone everything

 

[eyeCpc]

On the last build here XP Home was on an ide primary seeing Vista, Mandrake, and Solaris 10 on the second one. XP Pro fuond a home on the first sata with the second 500gb for storage and backup there.

I pondered seeing an array by eventually adding in two 750gb models and swiftly declined that idea. The new build now sees 3 of those 4 with Vista, XP Home, later Vienna? and maybe XP Pro 64bit along with Linux once one or two of the larger drives are installed.