Member Avatar for zzmster

Having read several partitioning strategies I keep seeing different opinions on the matter of location of the program files folder and or swap files. The need and essence of proper and smart partitioning of drives is clear to me.

However I can't figure out where to place the more demanding part of the program file folder i.e. Photoshop, Premiere, for maximum performance and output.

I have seen that most people tend to leave a 20-30 GB for programs in the OS partition [C:], some people make an seperate partition for programs on the OS drive [D:] and some people assign a different hard drive for the programs folder.

Which is best ?

Should programs folder be:

A: on the first partition of drive 1 (together with OS)

B: on the second partition of drive 1 (first beeing OS)

C: on the second partition of drive 2 (first beeing operating system page file).

It seems logical in some way to put it on the second drive, as far as efficiency goes; drive 1 runs OS while drive 2 is smoothly running Programs.

Ideas anynone ?

Specs;

Asus P5-AD2
P4 3.4
Corsair 5400 1Ghz

Drive 1: 74 GB IDE
Drive 2: 74 GB IDE

Drive 3: 120 GB Sata

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by nizzy1115
Member Avatar for nizzy1115

You might see a slight improvement of speed by putting them on 2 seperate hard drives. However, it wont be huge, becasue lots of the files have to get written to the main os drive no matter what. I have found that even different partitions of the same hard drive help with performance because it helps the drives from becoming fragmented as easily.

My setup
200 gb hd1 -> 50 gb os, 50 gb programs, 100 gb storage
200 gb hd2 -> 100 gb music, 100 gb video
80 gb hd3 -> 80 gb file backups
80 gb hd4 -> 80 gb music backup

By doing it this way, my drives rarely get fragmented, and when they do, it is quick to defragment them because of their partition size.

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