[WerTicus]

To get the best performance out of a windows machine you should use the rule of three

one drive for windows
one drive for the system cache
and one larger drive for all your stuff.

Only then look at adding raid to any given area as this will beat a one or two volume raid solution any day.

[jqp]

I have decided that this is a perfect time to get a new computer. I'm not excited about having to download/install all my programs and set everything up from scratch again, but it will be nice to start fresh again. Now, do I stick with XP or jump into Vista...

I almost suggested that since you probably have old technology with a 13GB drive size. What is your budget?

[JakeJ]

To get the best performance out of a windows machine you should use the rule of three

one drive for windows
one drive for the system cache
and one larger drive for all your stuff.

Only then look at adding raid to any given area as this will beat a one or two volume raid solution any day.

Do you mean three physically different drives or just partitions on a single drive? If so, is it simply a better arrangement in case of failure but yet less complex and expensive than a RAID array?

Thanks,
Jake

[jermmd]

To get the best performance out of a windows machine you should use the rule of three

one drive for windows
one drive for the system cache
and one larger drive for all your stuff.

Only then look at adding raid to any given area as this will beat a one or two volume raid solution any day.

How do you designate a drive for system cache?

[Levi]

Yes.  I used Acronis True Image Echo.  Use the clone disk feature.  It works with SCSI drives aswell.

No downtime.

Did I say, No downtime.  2X

Cheers,
Levi

My main hard drive is pretty small and has now become full. I run Windows XP and that is about all that is on the drive. Is there any way to copy the entire contents onto a new drive and then use that as the main drive?

[Imperial]

I also would recommend a full re-install.
However. Acronis does have a "migrate to another drive feature" ...
I use Ghost, Acronis or Paragon Drive backup when I want to create new drives, say for boot.
However, getting acquainted with how one creates a new effective re-install using NLITE is also a good idea!

Also another option is to "clean" the original 13Gig drive using CCleaner. http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/
This is a program that will free up space on a drive.
It's free by the way.

Tip 1.
Tip 2. ... building a computer (diy)
Tip 3: Spinrite 6. (I've got this one as well!!!) It's a HD rejuvenating tool! Awesome!


Imperial

[jqp]

'One drive for the System Cache' means put your windows "paging file" or "swap file" on a hard drive separate from the drive the Operating System (windows) is on. The paging file is what windows uses to allow you to have virtual memory, more than you have in physical RAM. Unfortunately you need to page to this file on the hard drive, but putting it on its 'own' drive (separate from windows) at least helps.

What this does is to give separate I/O channels to the processes that will really benefit - the OS and the paging file. So with the typical motherboard in the last few years, that comes with Ultra ATA, you have usually 4 IDE channels available (2 devices on each of 2 cables connected to the motherboard). You would have say, 2 hard drives on one ribbon cable (C: and D:) and maybe a CD  or DVD burner and another drive on the other cable. You want to install Windows on the C drive and then configure your paging file to be on the D drive to get this setup.

With todays motherboards you would have SATA drives instead of Ultra ATA/PATA drives. You can usually attach at least 6 SATA drives. This allows you to set up your paging file on D,E,F, drives etc which would further improve performance (on a server at least, can't remember if you can do this with XP) - yes you can put it on multiple drives on XP (My computer/Properties/Advanced/Performance-Settings/Advanced...)

[mca]

As an update, I am back up to speed with a new computer. The difference between this and my old computer is amazing. It was built by a local company, Hard Drives Northwest and still uses XP per my request. Intel 2.4 quad core with 4 gig of ram, 150 and 500 gig Seagate drives.

I'm also amazed that I was able to get everything downloaded and running that I had on my old computer in one evening, this includes setting up the router and my 3 Squeezeboxes 

[jqp]

Good - sounds like a fresh install?

So did they put the paging file on the second drive? Of course you can do that yourself easily.

[mca]

Yes, fresh install. Where can I find out how to do the paging file trick?

[Bob in St. Louis]

mca - I've been lurking on this thread with no intension of posting as I'm not much help when it come to the more advanced PC operations. However, I'm interested in what's going on here. The last couple days I've been paging (no pun intended) through the Microsoft support files and ran across what I believe to be what you're in need of.
Is this what you're looking for?:

Click the heading "How to manually change the size of the virtual memory paging file"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308417

Bob

[JEaton]

Yes, fresh install. Where can I find out how to do the paging file trick?

Start > Settings > Control Panel > System > Advanced > Performance|Settings > Advanced > Virtual memory|Change

Go down the list of partitions and set 'No paging file' for partitions on which you want no paging file, then either Custom or System managed size for those on which you do.  Note that you're looking at disk _partitions_, not physical hard drives.  There's no benefit to moving the paging file to another partition if it's on the same hard drive as the OS.  Reboot after making changes.

With XP in 4GB of RAM you're probably not going to see much, if any, performance benefit.