What do you put on your boot drive?

How do you organize your drives?

  • Boot drive has just the OS only

    Votes: 7 11.1%

  • Boot drive has just my games and other apps that require disk speed

    Votes: 12 19.0%

  • Boot drive has all apps only, other drives have all data only

    Votes: 33 52.4%

  • Half and half. Some apps/data here, some apps/data there.

    Votes: 7 11.1%

  • I organize my hard disks like Barney Gumbel organizes his apartment.

    Votes: 4 6.3%
  • Total voters
    63
P

PenaltyShot

Gawd
Joined
Sep 4, 2002
Messages
964
This is a poll for those of you who have a smaller, faster boot drive used in conjunction with a much larger (and maybe slower) secondary internal drive. I'm just wondering what the consensus is on the best way to arrange things.

I've heard everything from "Just put the OS on the boot drive, nothing else," to
"just put your games and other apps that require fast seek times on your boot drive", to
"Put ALL of your apps on the boot drive and just use your secondary drive for data ONLY."

So what do you think? (And -- if you have time to post a reply -- Why do you think that?)
 
I have my OS, apps, and files which require fast access (virtual machines for VMware, and recent torrents) on my Raptor. My other storage is all on a Solaris 10 machine using ZFS.
 
OS/Apps on the 320GB boot drive, Games on the 160GB Raptor (Mapped to C:\Games), Documents and media are on my 2x 2TB fileservers.

I also store a copy of my drivers folder on my Raptor, makes formatting easier when I always have whatever driver I need available after the first boot.
 
OS/apps/non-steam games on boot drive. All data and my and steam folder on storage drives.
Keep steam on a separate drive so I can easily reinstall it's games without loosing anything after a OS re-install.
 
the 36GB raptor in the server has windows, and um, office (its my pop retriver for outlook), and um, the raid software, and um...thats it. The 1.5TiB array holds everything else.

on the gaming rig the 320 is partitions with games and the OS on the primary, and the rest on a seperate partition. Laptop is the same but no games.
 
PenaltyShot said:
I'm having a brain freeze...How do you map an auxiliary local hard disk to the folder designation "C:\Games" ?
Click to expand...

In disk management:
1. Right click on drive, assign drive letter and path, remove the drive letter
2. Right click on drive, assign drive letter and path
3. Choose the option to mount it to an empty NTFS folder.
 
In the places where you say "right click on drive," which drive are you referring to, the boot or the secondary?

And I'm assuming that the empty NTFS folder is placed on the c: boot drive, and in your case is named Games?
 
Boot drive has my OS and all apps installed on it. Other drives have music/videos/game ISOs/documents/photos/etc
 
PenaltyShot said:
In the places where you say "right click on drive," which drive are you referring to, the boot or the secondary?

And I'm assuming that the empty NTFS folder is placed on the c: boot drive, and in your case is named Games?
Click to expand...

1. The drive you want to re-assign.
2. Yes, any empty NTFS folder anywhere on your system(except the drive you are mapping, of course) will do.
 
OK, thanks, I got it.

Sorry, I was misinterpreting the "assign drive letter and path" part as being what you do rather than the option in Disk Management to choose. (Actually the option in Disk Management is called "Change Drive Letter and Paths...") So I was thinking, OK, step one, I assign it a drive letter and path, then I remove it right away. That's...weird. Then step 2, I assign it again. Hmmm...lol

Ah well, it makes sense now.
 
Looks like most people are using the boot drive just for games and/or apps only. I'm rebuilding my P4 system that died, then I'll be building a new Yorkfield-based system in 1Q of 2008 and will be buying new hard disks for that. So was curious as to how other people were organizing things. I figure I'll get a fast Raptor for the boot with just apps and games on it, and a 1TB or something big for the data. Plus an external USB drive for backup.
 
40GB total for C drive that has all applications installed.
 
I typically use some kind of RAID setup. I do not partition the drives and I have everything all on the one volume. I like things simple.
 
OS and Apps on primart drive

Data on 3 external drives (Music, Programs, Movies), all 500gb'ers
 
Pair of 250GB's in RAID1, which automatically pull certain things off the network. (World of Warcraft, which pushes on exit, so I only have to download patches ONCE, for example.) My Zune library is local, but same deal, push and pull to the network. The network is a tangled mess under /opt on one of my 4-ways, currently up to two 12 packs of 300GB 10k drives in RAID5.
 
On a 250gb Seagate...

[C: WinXP 10gb] [D: Vista 25gb] [E: Games 50gb] [F: Programs 50gb] [G: Data/File Storage 115gb]

Runs a lot quicker with thought out partitions, everything that needs speed stays on the outside of the platter.
 
chris.c said:
On a 250gb Seagate...

[C: WinXP 10gb] [D: Vista 25gb] [E: Games 50gb] [F: Programs 50gb] [G: Data/File Storage 115gb]

Runs a lot quicker with thought out partitions, everything that needs speed stays on the outside of the platter.
Click to expand...

I think this is a common misconception. I don't believe that partitioning improves performance at all. Data is pretty much data and you will be more limited by the physical mechanics of the drive more than anything. The best way to improve drive performance will involve more physical drives, faster physical drives and moving your page file to a dedicated drive.
 
Dan_D said:
I think this is a common misconception. I don't believe that partitioning improves performance at all. Data is pretty much data and you will be more limited by the physical mechanics of the drive more than anything. The best way to improve drive performance will involve more physical drives, faster physical drives and moving your page file to a dedicated drive.
Click to expand...

The theory (or fact, really) is that data is read faster on the outside of a hard disk than the inside, because the outside spins a whole lot faster. I wanted to see if it made a difference in the real world, so I took a 320gb HD and partitioned it like this:

[C: empty 310gb] [D: windows 10gb]

Timed the install process, windows boots, ect.

Then did it like this:

[C: windows 10gb] [D: empty 310gb]

I had great results, try it out for yourself. I never used to partition, but I always do now. There is really no reason not to. Improves performance and organization.
 
It's great if you can make partitions work for you, but my problems with them have always been:

1. It's really, really hard for me (pretty much impossible, really) to plan ahead enough to know how much space for programs, games, etc. I'm going to need. I inevitably end up miscalculating at least one of the partitions. Which leads me to...

2. It's a time-consuming PITA to resize partitions, even with something like Partition Magic (which totally screwed up one of my partitions during a resize attempt once, and put me off of the product).

3. Somehow, rather than "more organization," multiple partitions have always felt like "more clutter" to me. Which is probably illogical, but it's just one of those intangibles.

As far as performance goes, I never really noticed much difference between partitions or no partitions.
 
I agree that that data is read faster from the outer tracks, looking at the figures from HDTune/HDTach, the transfer rate can halve from the outer tracks to the inner tracks.
I also agree that another drive gives a substantial benefit.
Why not do both :)

My Windows XP partition is 20GB, the rest of the drive is used for video and music storage.
I install all my Apps to the Windows partition and any spare space for Games if needed (like if I run out of space on my Games drive).
My second drive is for Games and the Swapfile, it has another 20GB Windows partition where the swapfile is located.

As the Windows partitions are created on the faster part of the disks (20GB of the outermost tracks on 200GB+ drives), I get near the fastest possible Windows data and Swapfile access.
 
Disk 0:
C:\ Windows Vista - 74 GB total (doesnt really need this much space, but I can't think of anything to use the other space for)

Disk 1:
D:\ Swap File (pagefile) - 4GB
E:\ Data Storage (documents, pictures) - 70GB

Disk 2:

F:\ Apps & Games - 40 GB
G:\ Movies - 71 GB (use this one to store movies after they've been ripped)

Disk 3:

H:\ Music - 40 BG
I:\ Ripped DVD's & Ripped Music 71 GB (use this one when im ripping from dvd/cd to disk)
 
getting ready to build system with raid 0 with 2 raptor 150 drives for windows and apps and raid 1 with 2 1TB GP drives for storage
 
got my apps/games, music, pictures and os on my first 1tb drive. Video on one of my 500s. Downloads in progress and temp files on my other 500. And ripped dvds (iso) and hd dvds on my other tb drive.
 
This is how I have my system setup.

Disk 0: 250GB
C:\ Windows XP (apps and games) - 116GB
D:\ Windows Vista (apps) - 116GB

Disk 1: 320GB
E:\ Temp (pagefile, temporary files, incomplete downloads) - 18GB
F:\ Storage (documents, pictures, movies, music) - 280GB

Disk 2: 320GB
G:\ Recovery (os images, data backup) - 298GB

Having data on a separate partition allows for fast defrags, while os images in the recovery partition allows for clean windows, apps, and games to be reinstalled in less than 20mins.

If your system is running a single hard drive, I don't think partitioning will give you any major performance increase. However I do agree that having windows and apps on the outermost partition does have an effect on performance.
 
Interesting setups on some of these. But with all of the variations, the general consensus definitely still seems to lean toward putting all apps on the boot drive, or at least on a separate drive from the data. Pretty much what I thought the results would be, but it's still good to get validation of your methods and to see how others are doing things. I got several good ideas out of this thread. Thanks guys.
 
I have all my mutimedia on the other drive, but I usually keep a lot of pictures/documents on the boot drive.
 
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