EggXpert

Hi folks,

I'm about to embark on my first build of a machine. Based on a number of recommendations, I have purchased both a solid-state drive and a regular ol' Western Digital 750 GB hard drive. I'm pretty much a novice when it comes to this sort of thing, but it's my understanding that the SSD is fundamentally far faster, and the general idea should be to install the OS/applications on the SSD, and use the regular HDD for data.

Given that, a few questions:

1. Are my assumptions above correct?

2. Windows 7 will be new to me, but I know that XP was pretty hinky if you wanted your "My Documents" anywhere other than the drive where the OS is installed. Does anyone know what's involved in telling Windows 7 I want all of my user data stored on my hard drive instead of the SSD?

3. Should I be taking steps to ensure the page file or whatever is on the HDD instead of the SSD?

4. Many moons ago, I was vaguely familiar with the whole concept of splitting up your drive into smaller partitions being a preferred practice, but I suspect the best practices around that may have changed. Would I set this up so I basically have the SSD as the "c" drive and the HDD as a giant "d" drive? Are there any technical reasons why it's preferable to do something different?

5. Are there any other things I should take into consideration when building / configuring this machine?

(The final build was this, give or take: http://www.eggxpert.com/forums/permalink/573543/576913/ShowThread.aspx#576913)

Thanks everyone!

Steve

sbattisti:

1. Are my assumptions above correct?

Yes.

 

sbattisti:

2. Windows 7 will be new to me, but I know that XP was pretty hinky if you wanted your "My Documents" anywhere other than the drive where the OS is installed. Does anyone know what's involved in telling Windows 7 I want all of my user data stored on my hard drive instead of the SSD?

I've never had any problems doing this in XP or any other OS, all it is, is an environment variable that you set and you're done..

 

sbattisti:

3. Should I be taking steps to ensure the page file or whatever is on the HDD instead of the SSD?

'Erm, that's a good question..   Since the page file is used to store old "active" data from your RAM, I'd say that it's pretty safe to assume that read/writes to it are going to be fairly random so you'd want it on the SSD..

 

sbattisti:

4. Many moons ago, I was vaguely familiar with the whole concept of splitting up your drive into smaller partitions being a preferred practice, but I suspect the best practices around that may have changed. Would I set this up so I basically have the SSD as the "c" drive and the HDD as a giant "d" drive?

You have no choice, the SSD and the HD cannot share the same letter..

 

sbattisti:

Are there any technical reasons why it's preferable to do something different?

Not really...  If you are really a performance freak (and I do mean "freak" enough to the point where you might need some serious help)...  If you split the hard drive capacity in half, the partition that's on the outside of the platter will have higher I/O than the partition on the inside of the platter simply because the hard drive always spins at the same speed and on the outside, the radius is bigger, so more data passes under the head..  However, since Windows XP, defraggers have gotten pretty darn smart about these kinds of things and so there's no longer any need to split a single drive into smaller partitions for performance reasons..  Just let the Windows defragger do it's thing and leave the hard drive partitioned as a single drive.

 

Thanks very much! I'm definitely nowhere near that level of freakishness. Regarding drive letters, that wasn't quite what I meant. I was more asking, is there any technical reason why I should consider partitioning the 750GB HDD? Or should I just leave it as one big 750GB partition?

Thanks again!

Steve

Hey Steve, Sidicas is correct and as to the d drive if you go into Admint tools and use disk manager it will do the format of the D drive and you can partition it off if you want but the only thing this will do is give you seperate areas to store different info IE: music, videos, data and pictures. It will also save time if you say copy the videos to disc and then just reformat that drive.

Excellent, thanks for the help, guys!

Case arrived last night (wow, what a monster!), so just waiting on the DVD drive and a fresh copy of Windows 7 before I get building! :D