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

definetly put the page file on the first partition of the 2nd drive. the system files should be on the first partition of the 1st drive.

how much are u looking to spend on a drive and where do u live(country)?

Yep, go for a sataII version.

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.

well imo that is the best drive to get, its 95$ at newegg w/ free shipping. im actually waiting for newegg to ship on of those out to me right now...

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)

What is the main function for swap file?

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 .

i know that evryone says this and i would have to suppose its true, but its just not true for me
my pagefile will go all the way up to 2 gigs even if i have over a gig of free phyhsical memory.

Wow, normally the system unloads DLLs to free up physical RAM... But 2GB... that is a lot...

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.

Time for vLite

definetly will for my next install. maybe this weekend when i get my new hdd..

Then 1.07 will be out .

Thanks for the great tips guys and girls. I'm looking forward to my new drive.