Partitioned or Separate Harddrive for OS

alanrowell

Just building a new PC and was wondering if it's better to create a separate partition just for OS & programs or to have it installed on a separate harddrive?

Are there any significant performance issues either way?

Could I use an old 80GB laptop drive for the OS drive?

Seagull

I would have thought that the o/s would operate faster if it's accessing programs on the same drive as itself, I'd have a seperate drive (or partition) for other files such as documents, photos, music files etc.

JamesUK_3

Depends on why you want to do so.

If you have files on a seperate partition then if you wanted to reinstall windows or upgrade it or it went a bit faulty and had to wipe it clean and start again, it wouldnt need to have the files backed up when you did so. However if you physically get a hardware fault and the drive breaks you lose EVERYTHING.

A seperate drive will save things from being lost, however if you have the two drives on the same IDE cable it will only be able to access ONE device at a time, possibly slowing down file times.

Although technically there is nothing really WRONG with having everything on the same drive, its all down to personal preference and which you feel safer with.

... and yes you can use an old laptop hard drive however you may need a converter to connect it as it will only be a 2.5" drive instead of the normal sized pc drive.

JonnyThunder

The only time you really see a difference in performance with harddisks, is if you have more than one harddisk. You can run your operating system on one DRIVE and your pagefile on another (on different channel). And for things like photoshop where you can specify a different drive for the swapfile.

On one harddisk, there is no difference between having one partition and having 3 partitions. There are advantages for restoring images using programs like ghost (making it quick to restore just one partition).

Chippy_Minton

For ease of recovery from disk faults etc, create separate partitions for Windows, Programs, Documents and Page file. With 2 hard drives, you could create a 15 GB partition for Windows on the first drive (C: ) and use the remaining space as a backup partition. Put the other partitions on the second drive. Put the page file mainly on the 2nd drive and also allocate a small amount on C: for it.

You can use nLite for setting up Windows like this.