i have a 7G and new 30G hard drive.Someone said in the past to put my os on one hard drive all by its self and put all my program files on another and my computer will scream.Has anybody heard of this? I need to know if I need to put the hard drives on seperate ide cables or put them on the same?
ant truth to this?

Its probably best to leave your hard drives on the same IDE channel, and your CD-ROMS on another. If you put Win2k on just one drive, and not anything else, youve wasted one drive. A better thing to do is make a separate partition for your SWAP FILE and that ought to speed things up a bit. Ive got a Voodoo 4 AGP and when I put the swap file separately things flew. If you do use both hard drives, find out which is the faster one, probably your 30GB hdd, and put the swap file partition on that one.

I disagree with some of the above.

1st: putting your swap file on only a separate partition is of no use [except for organizational purposes], unless it is on a different physical drive - one drive spinning with separate partitions is still just one drive spinning.

2nd: if you do put your program files on a separate drive, then putting them on the same IDE channel would only slow you down, as only one device can use the channel at a time.

3rd: if you give us more info about all drives you have [hdds and CD-ROMs], then you may get more suggestions about how to configure them.

Out of personal curiosity, what does having a "Voodoo4 AGP" have to do with your swap file and harddrive configuration?

-bZj

i have a maxtor promise pci ata/100 card, maxtor 7G 33 and a maxtor 30G 100 and a hp burner and creative 32x cdrom.
i tried leaving win2k on 7G in motherboard and put quake2 and project igi on other 30G on promise card and played both games off of both hardrives and did'nt see any performance increase either way.also put swap file on 30G by itself and still no noticeable improvement.maybe win2k on 30G-100 and swap file on 7G-33 would be better, any thoughts?

p2-350
128M pc-100
bx board

My configuration.
Athlon TBird 1000MHZ
392MB Ram
10,000rpm 9.1gig Fujitsu UW-SCSI(FAST AND QUIET) :-)
4partitions 1)150mb dos 2)4.5 gig Whistler 3)3gig empty 4)remaining space Whistler cabs + drivers
2x 7,200rpm Maxtor 13.6gig ATA-66 disks Raid 0 (Promise hacked card)
1) 600MB swap partition 2) Rest of disk is a big fat a$$ 24.3gig or so partition for program files and games.

This runs extremely fast. Much better than running everything off of one drive or the raid setup alone. It's pretty cool to see windows boot and both disks are accessed at the same time. Under my old IDE only setup having Windows on one disk/channel and programs on the other worked great. If you use the CD-Rom with Digital audio through IDE often then I would suggest not placing the drive on a channel where windows or the swap file resides. If the Cd-Rom is just for safedisc loading (games) and app installs then it wont matter. Just making sure that the two disks arent on the same channel is enough. If you burn discs over IDE however make sure the Burner is not on the same channel with the disk containing the temp file used for burning. I have only had a problem maybe a couple of times at the most burning from a drive on the same channel with the burner and I think I was loading an app or something. I cant remember.

I hope this long *** post helps.

Tes

Hey Alex,

I would stick by my original statement, adding what you said as an addendum.

Defragging the swap partition was considered in my 'organizational' idea.

While I know that the outside of the disk spins faster, I am hard pressed to believe that it is that much faster when we're talking about 7200rpm drives [even 4500rpm drives]. Just my belief, but I don't have a trig book with me to prove it though.

-bZj

circumference of a circle is 2*pi*radius, so it's precisely a linear relationship. Data that's 1 inch from the center will pass about 6.3 inches of data per revolution, while data that's 2 inches from the center will pass 12.6 inches of data over the drive heads per revolution. That's a pretty significant difference to me....

This is just mathematically though, which is pretty ideal. There will still be a difference between the inner and outer edge, but it may not be that dramatic. I can't find a benchmark that show the position on the disk though, so I can't give numbers to back it up. (HDTach will do it, but the free version doesn't work under NT/2K)

I have HDTach 2.61, but the options are very limited, and only test drive by drive, not partition by partition.

Most hdds are only 3" in diameter though, so the most differentiated references that could be made are .5" to 1.5" - which gives a large difference on paper, but is still insignificant once other factors are taken into account, in my opinion. [.5" * pi * 7200rpm = 11309.73"data/min. VS. 1.5" * pi * 7200rpm = 33929.20"data/min.]

I think it would be more beneficial to have it on a separate hdd than to go through the trouble of having it on the 1st partition of your system drive, forcing you to install on the second partition. Leaving it to have all the rotations to itself, and not to have to share them with all the other programs you are using, once again, just my opinion.

-bZj