Hard drive IDE arrangement

[thatbox]

Just a quick "how would you" scenario for setting up my IDE drives:

I finally got around to reformatting my Xbox's old hard drive today, so I've got a fresh eight-gigger. I've been getting along fine with my 30GB OS hdd and a 160GB storage/page file hdd on the first cable and a DVD drive all by its lonesome on the second. I'm thinking that maybe dedicating the 8GB hdd to an admittedly enormous page file could be a good idea, but that would mean putting either it or the storage drive on the same cable as the burner, which I'm hesitant to do.

What would be the best way to do this?

I'm sporting a 1600+ and 512MB of PC2100, if that changes anything somehow.

Thanks!

 

[Baked]

Don't see the benefit of using a 8GB page file HD, but if you insist, move the 160GB over to 2ndary w/ the DVD, and put the 8GB in primary w/ the OS HD. The DVD's read and write performance won't change whether you share the channel or not.

 

[tallman45]

Partition the 8gb drive so that you can move the pagefile periodically between the 2 and reformat the drive. You cannot defrag a pagefile that is in use and a pagefile does fragment hence lost performance.

 

[Accord99]

Originally posted by: tallman45
Partition the 8gb drive so that you can move the pagefile periodically between the 2 and reformat the drive. You cannot defrag a pagefile that is in use and a pagefile does fragment hence lost performance.

A pagefile that's not fragmented to begin with will never fragment. The one major issue with the 8GB HD is that it's probablyvery slow in comparison (low transfer rates, slow access times etc) to the other drives and could in fact hinder performance. You may want to do some benchmarks to see how it compares.

 

[thatbox]

It's a 5200 RPM Western Digital Protégé WD80EB with a 2MB cache and a 12.1ms seek time [Anandtech actually documented this, I've discovered]. My other two drives are 7200 RPM - the 160GB has a 2MB cache and 8.9ms/10.9ms read/write seek times and the 30GB Maxtor has a 2MB cache and a 10ms average seek time.

Edit: My rationale behind the dedicated paging file drive is that there won't be any scooting back and forth between system files or log-writing or anything and the swap space, and so things might speed up a little bit, maybe.