I have two systems running right now I am thinking of putting two hard drives in, both of the boot drives would be a Maxtor 20gb IDE. The secondary drives would be a Maxtor 300gb SATA in my X64 system and a WD 250IDE in my X32 system.

Would this help performace or hurt it? I remember years ago (99ish) I put a 2nd hard drive in my computer and ran EverQuest from the non-boot drive and it drastically increased my load time. But this was back in the days of <10gb drives and small caches.

no it wouldnt hurt performance at all.

Why not trowing out the 20GB drives? They are a lot slower then your new drives. I would use them as master drives any time and keep the 20GB drives for backup or so... just think about it.

My main reason is because I reformat my pc every 6 months or so. With two computers running with 200+gb hard drives worth of info backing up before reformating can be long and tedious (and hopefully you don't forget to copy anything before you reinstall).

I would be using the 20gbs as a primary master to boot from and all my programs would run off the newer larger drives. I would think that since the OS is running from one location and the programs from another it would speed things up regardless of the boot drive.

But logic doesn't always seem to apply in the computer world.

well that works too, or you could just parition you large hdd. make a 20gig partition if u want just for the OS. that way if u want to reformat it will only reformat that 1 partition.

Put your pagefile on the faster drive. This will increase the performance.

Also, size is not an indicator of speed. It's the rotational speed which counts. E.g. WD Raptor 10K RPM drives don't hold much (18, 36 and 74Gb) but they're much faster than e.g. a 300Gb 7200RPM drive.

Also, size is not an indicator of speed. It's the rotational speed which counts. E.g. WD Raptor 10K RPM drives don't hold much (18, 36 and 74Gb) but they're much faster than e.g. a 300Gb 7200RPM drive.

I´m sure we are not talking about Raptor drives here, they are just old-school 20GB drives that came in 5400 or 7200rpm with 2MB cache .

To make a partition of 20MB would be the best indeed (in my eyes).