The only way to install windows

Ok, for anyone who didn't already know this, windows is about 500% faster if you seperate your drive into 3 (or more) partitions.
You need one for Windows itself
- 8-15GB
One for Swap space
- 2x your ram
One for programs
- remaining space

UPDATE:
If you have multiple drives, Try to keep your swap partition on a drive that doenst have your programs on it, such as a backup drive.  My favorite way to have it set up is to have programs and windows on 2 seperate partitions on one drive, and the swap and backup on the other drive.
/update

I have done this on all of my computers, and it makes everything much quicker.  It prevents a lot of the fragmentation that occurs on disks.  Just remember to set the virtual memory to your swap partition, and to defragment the windows partition as soon as you install, and whenever you run (major) updates.

Also... (as an after thought) RAID-0 is AWESOME!

My 2x80GB segates (under the above setup) sustain around 90MB/s and burst around 180MB/s.

UPDATE:
If you dont know how to change your swap location, follow this step-by-step:

- Right click on 'My Computer'
   +Select properties
- Go to the Advanced tab
   +Under the performance section (should be the top) click 'Settings'
- Move to the Advanced tab
   +Click 'Change' at the bottom of the window.
- Click on your windows drive, and select the 'No paging file' radio button
- Click on your swap drive, and select 'Custom size'
   +Set the minimum and maximum to 1.5 times your amound of RAM.
/update

raid o is great. I find its hard on overclocked hardware. but it rocks.

More info. posted :D

my self i run 3 drivers. 1 named windows for basic software. 1 named my documents all pics , music , videos etc are saved there. and one named games. all gaming software is saved there.

Your OS is on the 2x36GB Raptor RAID0 setup, correct?

nope. the raptors died. guess they didnt like the overclock.

Greg, you got some greeeat advice. Never thought of it before, ya know>>> :guh:

who knows. wish i never bought them. 36 gig hard drives are to freeking small i was always runing out of room.

Greg, I tried this, but I rarely see any improvement in boot times or game performance. Perhaps I am missing something?

I don't know, but on my 80GB Segate w/ 512MB ram, it made a WORLD of difference. Mostly it helped in loading games, but it made windows startup about 5 seconds slower :yammer:. Many other people swear by this as well. I don't know if it helped my gaming rig (2x80GB in raid-0) but at least it keeps things organized.

Last edited by KoolDrew on Wed Jul 27, 2005 6:53 pm; edited 1 time in total

I do know you are trying to help, but you are not giving good advice.  Let me explain.

You are suggesting to put the pagefile, OS and apps all on seperate partitions, but on the same physical drive. All this will do is increase seek times when acessing them. The pagefile should be on the most-used partition and on the least-used HDD.

The bottom line is that what is important is organizing frequently-accessed files so that they are near each other as it will reduce seek time and seek time is everything when it comes to HDD performance. Transfer rate is almost nothing and rotational latency is in between.

Also none of the OS files, once acessed are read from one one end to the other to the exclusion of access to any other files... two words: \"Demand paging.\" One of the reasons fragmentation of the OS files matters as little as it does is that the heads are hopping all over the disk anyway, paging in a bit of one file here, a bit of another there. So when they get back to the first file again it really doesn't matter if they can go back to a place contiguous with the first chunk; they have to move the heads again either way.

XP's \"image prefecth\" feature modifies this \"pure demand paging\" model, and pretty much renders defraggers unnecessary and (if they're unaware of prefetch) even harmful as far as code files are concerned.

It is best to have as small amount of partitions as possible.  I recommend having one partition for OS and Apps and another for storage.  This will keep them seperated so if you reformat you can just reformat the first partition and still have all your MP3's, pr0n etc.  You should not split up the pagefile, OS or Apps.  This will reduce performance since as I mentioned before you want ytour frequently acessed stuff next to eachother to reduce seek times.

Also RAID-0 offers no real-world performance gain for the most part.  See this article.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

Syntehetic benchmarks may show an increase, but not real-world performance.  Also the PF and virtual memory are two different things and for the majority of the users it is best to leave the PF system managed, but to find the optimal size you need to run your most intensive applications like you would in a normal day or w/e. Then measure PF usage using perfmon. This is the only way to measure Pf usage using built-in tools. If you want something else this will work.

Once you have figured your PF usage multiply this number by 4. That number should be set as your initial size. For the max multiply the number you just calculated by at least 2.

You should not set a \"fixed\" value either.  With my recommendation the PF will never have to resize anyway because the initial size is high enough for your needs. However if it does come a time where it needs to resize it can. Setting a fixed size removes this \"safety net.\"

Also you should never disable the pagefile. Many people will also recommend this to improve performance, but all this will do is hurt you. First of all you have to realize the pagefile is NOT the only file involved with paging. All exe's and dl''s are also. So when you do disable the pagefile you have to keep all \"private\" data in RAM and only code and mapped files can be paged. So even if the \"private\" stuff has not been touched in hours. So this will cause more paging of code. It also means that paging cannot be correctly balanced. It will also cripple the file cache and slow down code execution. Also not to mention some applications will fail without a pagefile.

Also in theory moving any file to the outer cylinders of the drive will help, but in real-world performance it will not. This only makes a difference in sustained transfer rate and the PF IO is never in buffers of more than 64KB at any given time. This is basically the same reason why fragmentation is taken way too seriously by a lot of people. When a executable is read so are all the libraries it needs. Of course loading all of it in RAM would be a waste of memory so it only loads the immediately necessary parts. This is called demand paging. So regardless if the file is fragmented or not the head will have to move anyway, paging a bit here and there. Seek time is everything when it comes to HDD performance so you want your most frequently-accessed stuff together. So the pagefile should be on the most-used partition and the least-used HDD. This will give you best performance. However whether you will benefit from it not will depend on the amount of RAM you have and your usage patterns.

I agree with KoolDrew. You shouldn't have partitions all over the place. It is best to have multiple drives with a couple partitions each.

Personally, I have one Hard Drive, divided into three partitions-

C: Windows XP and Apps
U: All of my programs
W: Backup Information

And it helps to defrag your drives EVERY NIGHT!!!! And run scandisk (or a similar program) at least once a week.

You shouldn't have a separate partition for programs. This will increase your average seeking distance, thus decreasing performance. Also, defragging every night is completely unnecessary. Fragmentation matters far less then defrag vendors and many people want you to believe because the heads are hopping all over the disk anyway, paging in a bit of one file here, a bit of another there. So when they get back to the first file again it really doesn't matter if they can go back to a place contiguous with the first chunk; they have to move the heads again either way.

XP's \"image Prefetch\" feature modifies this \"pure demand paging\" model, and pretty much renders defraggers unnecessary and (if they're unaware of prefetch) even harmful as far as code files are concerned.

Fragmentation will only make a difference in performance if the files you frequently access are heavily fragmented. Have you even checked the \"split IO\" counts in perfmon? The \"split IO\" count is the number of IOs that had to be \"split\" - performed as two or more IOs to the disk - due to either fragmentation or buffer size issues. They are almost always due to fragmentation. You need to evaluate this alongside the total IO count to the drive. A value of 9 means that in the last collection interval there was an average of 9 additional IOs per second due to fragmentation. That isn't much, and if the drive is doing 40 or 100 IOs per second anyway, it REALLY isn't much. See?

Even when it comes to the pagefile you see tons of sites claiming fragmentation of it will severely hamper performance. Only if it is extremely fragmented will it hurt performance in any way. This is because pagefile read and writes are never larger then 64KB - Pages are 4K, but the modified page writer does aggregate them and write them out in \"clusters\" of up to 64KB each - and with IOs to many other files they are almost never in sequential 64KB chunks. This is why seek time is everything in HD performance and also why moving the pagefile to the outer-most cylinders on the drive will not help performance.