Harddiscs : Basic or Dynamic?

[buggerlugs]

I've just added a second harddisk to my windows xp pro pc and discovered i've had to add it and format it in the storage portion of administrative tools/computer management/storage.

My Master C: drive is a 40gb "BASIC" drive with xp on it, and I now have a slave 120gb formated "dynamic" drive and its been allocated the drive letter F

I have a few questions from this little venture.

1. As I'd like to just use this slave drive for storing files and using it for downloading too is it best as a DYNAMIC or BASIC drive?

2. What advantages and disadvantages are there in having it dynamic ?

3. Am I better off having lots of volumes or just one?

4. How can I get this drive letter to "D" and my dvdrom and dvdr to "E" and "F" ?

Master is a 40gb seagate barracuda 4

Slave is a 120gb Maxtor

[XtremeMaC]

3. u're better off with 2 drives

4. go to disk management from comp management right click on the drive u want to change the letter of, choose "change drive letters and path" and change it to whatever u want..

[rlocone]

3. Am I better off having lots of volumes or just one?

4. How can I get this drive letter to "D" and my dvdrom and dvdr to "E" and "F" ?

Well I used to use dynamic for one reason. I used to combine my drives into on DRIVE D. So, I only have 3 drive letters worry about. But a lil problem cropped up. If I had to reinstall it would break the spanned volume. You can't get back in. When windows came back up it would report missing volume. So for now I left everything to basic cause of that reason. If anyone know how to correct my issue please let me know.

Thanks

[buggerlugs]

3. You mean I'm better off with just two drives or 2 volumes on my new drive?

4. I've tried this, because my dvdrom and dvdr are using D and E the settings for the new drive only allow F onwards

5. Is your avatar a Klingon Insignia?

[rlocone]

3. You mean I'm better off with just two drives or 2 volumes on my new drive?

4. I've tried this, because my dvdrom and dvdr are using D and E the settings for the new drive only allow F onwards

5. Is your avatar a Klingon Insignia?

That's what I'd suggest unless someone has a better suggestion.

As for my avatar. You're close it's the Obsidian Order & Cardassian 2nd Order Insignia. I was planning on putting up there Gul Dukat. Thanks for noticing...

[Ge0ph]

Change your dvdrom and dvdr to something like x and y. That will free up D so you can make your second hard drive D. Then change your dvdrom and dvdr back to E and F (or what ever you want).

I'm a big fan of one partiton per drive.

[ahab]

1 partition on basic disks

except... I do like to stick a scratch partition on one of my fast drives if i can't dedicate a drive exclusively to it. Logfiles, tempfiles, downloads, caches all go here to help alleviate fragmentation on my other partitions. It gets cleaned out every week or so.