gaming on 2 hard drives

[Tallgeese]

ok i heard from somewhere that 7200 rpm 8mb cache hard drives are usually the best for gaming. (not too sure on that though)

I have a WD 30gb hard drive as my OS, and a seagate 200 gb hard drive as extra storage. the WD is only 2mb cache and not sure about the rpms, but i know for sure that the seagate is better.

now the question is, should i partition the seagate and use that as my OS instead of the WD so that my games will operate better or will it make no difference if I run it from the WD. i have win XP 2.2 ghz

thanks in advance

[james8547]

I usually place newer drives with faster seek time to be the boot drive. If the seagate has a faster seek time, then it would be better performance-wise to have the OS installed there. I'm not sure if you would notice the difference though.

[Blakhart]

There are a few ways to look at this. Once games are loaded into mem, the only way a disk factors into gameplay is loading maps. Faster is "better". More than enough mem is even better. Same goes for the os; once booted, most of the kernel and os will be in mem. The one thing about the os drive is that no matter what, even if you disabled pageing, it will always be paging things to disk from mem. So here too, faster is "better". As well as is more than enough mem yet again.
In the case of having two fairly fast disks, I would make a partition on each drive for swap, say 4gigs in size as the first partition, and then whichever drive is going to have the os, make say a 5 gig partition for it next to the swap. The one drive that doesn't get the os still gets a swapfile partition. This way swap can be read from and written to at the same time, if the drives are on separate channels.

Keep in mind that the speed diff between going to disk and going to mem is kinda like this:

Going to mem would be like email. How long does it take to send an email?

Going to disk would be like delivered by freighter with many stops at ports before it finaly reaches the delivery port. As in months.

Keep the pagefile size on each drive managed by xp rather than by setting it's size yourself. You made a swap partition at the beginning of each drive because the beginning is the fastest part of any drive. The latency/context switch/whatever hit from not haveing the pagefile smack in the middle of the os files is made up for by the fact that once paging starts, it doesn't just grab only the file in question, it grabs everything next to it to save another trip if the next page is indeed in that area. This will be done fastest if the pagefile is on the fastest part of a drive.
As to having enough mem, a gig is almost needed anymore for best performance in todays games, sad to say. A gig of mem will usualy want a pagefile size of at least 1.5 gigs. If you have two pagefiles of 1.5gigs each, you will be doing fine. Once you reach a single disk pagefile size of 4gigs, there is a performance hit incurred according to M$. If you have that total size divided onto two disks, you shouldn't have any penalty.
Just some thoughts for you.

edit;
XP (and most other os's) uses an algorerythm (heh get it? Al gore???) to find out wich drive is fastest between multiple swapfiles. If one drive is a good deal faster than another, the other may seldom be used unless/untill the faster drive is in use. In such case the slower drive will be used, giving you (and the os) a benefit. Another thing to keep in mind is one pagefile per disk. This means: Don't put more than one pagefile on any one disk. Keeping pagefiles free of fragmentation is a good thing too. There are apps that can defrag pagefiles for ya if ya want.