Additional hard drive installation in XP

[PcAbuser]

Hello all,

I am getting ready to install an additional hard drive in my Dell 4550.
P-4-266 ghz 512 ram XP Pro.
Radeon 9700 with 128 meg ram.
It currently has a 60 gig drive, in one partition.

The new drive I am installing is a 120 gig drive.

I am planning on moving my pagefile to the secondary drive for performance reasons.

One other possible consideration is, my wife is a heavy gamer.

My question is two-fold.

1--- how many partitions would you recommend making the 120 gig drive, and why? I had been planning on two 60 gig ones.

Deragmentation time is not a consideration to me, as the system runs it on the existing 60 gig drive in under 10 minutes with only 33% free.

2--- Are there any benefits to installing it as a slave to the IDE channel with the CD ROM, as opposed to sharing the same IDE channel with the master hard drive?

I would highly appreciate any and all recommendations.

Best regards,

Marlon

Do well unto others, else you will/should, not respect what you see in the mirror at the end of the day!

 

[1stITMAN]

Ok here we go

A 1) Partition is up to the user I would suggest well this what i found any way

http://partition.radified.com/partitioning_4.htm

A 2)

http://www.mikeshardware.com/howtos/howto_connect_ide_hd.html

http://www.buildyourowncomputer.net/step7.html

I.T Systems Support Engineer
Bsc. (Hons).

 

[kiddpete]

Why partition it at all? If it doesn't buy you anything, avoid the hassle of worrying about a partition filling up.

 

[PcAbuser]

First of all,

Thank you both for your responses.

1stITMAN,

I found your links helpful. especially the second one. Thank you.

Kiddpete,

The main reason I am considering making two or more partitions out of the new drive, DOES have "some" to do with defragmentation, but not so much.

I have found in the past, that the larger the partition, the more "splatter" you get with the system throwing data randomly on the drive, thus leaving less free contiguous space available, and taking longer for the drive to search.

The system may throw some data at the beginning of the drive, then the next piece of data at the end. I think you get the idea.

If the system has two partitions, and knows program X is on one or the other of the two, there is less seek time to get to the data.
You can think of this as kind of a sorting tab on a physical binder you store documents in.
If you know a certain documant is in tab X, then you don't waste you time starting from the beginning of the binder to look for it, you start in tab X thus saving time looking for the particular document.

Best regards, and again, thank you for responding.

Any other opinions from the great members of Tek-Tips would be welcome and appreciated as well.

Do well unto others, else you will/should, not respect what you see in the mirror at the end of the day!