TheMajor
PowerQuest / Opera
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Put your pagefile on the fastest drive. Preferably on the drive that does not hold your games and programs.
Western Digital 74 gb 10,000 Raptor
- Thread starter dartgande
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If you put your OS on the RAID it is more complicated, then you have to download drivers beforehand onto a floppy and install them before you install Windows, then if it works i guess you continue normally... not so sure, installing an os onto a raid is tricky business, but it would be fast. If you use something else for your os then its not nearly as bad, Also if you use the RAID for your os then you have to decide if you want RAID 1 or 0 it. Raid 1 is putting the same information onto both drives for stability in case the raid fails, the downside is that you only get the space of one drive. The other is RAID 0 which is putting half the info on either drive, this way you get the space of both hd's but if the raid fails all your data is useless and if you have your os on it then youre screwed.
RAID is nice, but apparently it's tricky to set up. You have to press F6 when prompted during Windows Setup, and do a bunch more stuff. I'll do it at some point, but haven't yet.
What I'm going to do is just get one Raptor for my OS and programs. I have a 300GB 7200RPM 16MB cached Maxtor external hard drive. If the 16MB Maxtor drives are comparable to the Raptor, I am disappointed, because the Maxtor isn't all that fast, but I didn't buy it for speed, I bought it for capacity. Since I have a laptop and will soon be building a desktop PC, an external is ideal as it can be swapped between the two, or put in the bag with the laptop and taken across the country.
If you got 2 Raptors and didn't RAID them, you could have your OS and programs on one and your pagefile on the other. That would work pretty good.
A note about installing programs and games on a second hard drive (not the system dir) that's all well and good, but if anything happens to the system drive, the game might become unusable! It depends on how much the game or program depends on the Windows Registry. For example, long story but I have the game Deus Ex in a ZIP file. I don't install it, I merely unpack it. Nothing for the registry. This is totally safe to have on another hard drive. I could run it off my external if I wanted. Now let's say a program relies heavily on the Registry. You have a problem with Windows, you reinstall it (and thus rewrite the registry), and now your program starts acting up. Some programs work off INI (configuration script) files; these are better suited to work off a second hard drive, but if you reinstall Windows, you'll just have to re-create the file extensions that program may have had.
(I know, Reformatting and Reinstalling Windows is a hobby of mine...)
What I'm going to do is just get one Raptor for my OS and programs. I have a 300GB 7200RPM 16MB cached Maxtor external hard drive. If the 16MB Maxtor drives are comparable to the Raptor, I am disappointed, because the Maxtor isn't all that fast, but I didn't buy it for speed, I bought it for capacity. Since I have a laptop and will soon be building a desktop PC, an external is ideal as it can be swapped between the two, or put in the bag with the laptop and taken across the country.
If you got 2 Raptors and didn't RAID them, you could have your OS and programs on one and your pagefile on the other. That would work pretty good.
A note about installing programs and games on a second hard drive (not the system dir) that's all well and good, but if anything happens to the system drive, the game might become unusable! It depends on how much the game or program depends on the Windows Registry. For example, long story but I have the game Deus Ex in a ZIP file. I don't install it, I merely unpack it. Nothing for the registry. This is totally safe to have on another hard drive. I could run it off my external if I wanted. Now let's say a program relies heavily on the Registry. You have a problem with Windows, you reinstall it (and thus rewrite the registry), and now your program starts acting up. Some programs work off INI (configuration script) files; these are better suited to work off a second hard drive, but if you reinstall Windows, you'll just have to re-create the file extensions that program may have had.
(I know, Reformatting and Reinstalling Windows is a hobby of mine...)
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