New OS vs old HDD

[mud beaver]

I am planning on installing windows 7 home premuim on an old (2007) sata 320GB Western Digital Caviar hdd.

The drive was in use when my last system died and had windows xp home on it. The drive is also partitioned into two sections, windows xp on one part and my randoms files on the other.

My question is, when I install windows 7 should I delete the partition and just use the entire drive or would it be fine to just format the windows xp part and leave the files on the other?

I wont be heart broken either way but if performance wont be jeopardized I would like to keep the random files on the other partition.

what do you guys think ?

 

[carnageX]

That's really up to you on how you would like the drive to be split or not. Not much of a difference either way, other than files and OS not being on the same partition (which can be a good thing sometimes).

You'll just want to move your document folders to the other drive (which is easy to do in Win7).

 

[mud beaver]

will it affect the HDD performance if i only format the one partition and not as a whole drive at once ?

 

[carnageX]

Shouldn't.

 

[PP Mguire]

Make sure that you have at least 40GB on the partition you want to install Windows on. Essentially it should "increase" performance as having the smaller partition should be short stroking it. Although sadly you probably won't see that much of a difference.

 

[mud beaver]

The one side with the OS will have about 200GB

I was worried about stability as well as performance if I didnt format the entire drive

 

[PP Mguire]

It'll be fine.