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how to best take advantage of a new hard drive


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Hi guys,

I'm planning on getting a new hard drive for christmas as the old one is quite full. Since I'll be rearranging all my data and maybe reinstalling xp I figured this would be a good time to implement any new ideas. Things along the lines of putting the page file on another drive (is there actually a noticeable peformance increase), system files on one partition data on another, and so on. Any tips or recommendations that you guys have found usefull would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

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I think I already have the drive picked out. I'll most likely be getting a 320gig seagate, one of the new perpendicular ones. But I'm of of course open to suggestions for something around $100. I'm in the US by the way.

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I own the 7200.10 sata2 16MB 320GB seagate drive. you will be amazed at the perf.

Since windows uses the 'least busy drive' for swap, if I were you I would reinstall to the 7200.10 drive, and put a swapfile of set size (1GB or so) on each drive. That solves several gotchas at once.

I would also install all large apps to the second drive, while small apps and OS on the 7200.10 I also like my OS partition to be 10GB to keep it from spanning large areas across the drive and increasing seek times when a lot is installed. That also gives you the best area of the disk as far as of-platter speed goes.

in a nutshell:

~10GB partition on the new drive for OS and small programs (also a ~1GB swapfile)

~the rest on the new drive for high speed storage

~the old drive for installing large programs to (also a ~1GB swapfile)

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swap partition is used like RAM when the actual RAM usage is high. its similar to pagefile, but a lot more stable and better.

@ MGadAllah,

In better words, if it’s a Windows swap-file then it’s a page-file.

It’s virtual memory that is written / read frequent to/from the drive. If your system RAM is full then it needs a page-file to release some of the system RAM. See the article on Wikipedia for more info ;).

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It’s virtual memory that is written / read frequent to/from the drive. If your system RAM is full then it needs a page-file to release some of the system RAM. See the article on Wikipedia for more info ;).

i know that evryone says this and i would have to suppose its true, but its just not true for me :wacko:

my pagefile will go all the way up to 2 gigs even if i have over a gig of free phyhsical memory.

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well it is vista.. but im talking about when im doing alot of stuff. right now its using 750mb of pagefile and 625mb of physical ram... just seems kinda pointless to me. and im doing nothing right now but using the internet.

Edited by ripken204
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