Help me juggle multiple HD's

[Adcadet]

I thought this belonged in this forum since it's a little more of an academic question than urgent. Anyway ....

I'm wondering if there is clearly an optimal way to configure my system:

MSI K8T Neo, A64 3000+, 512 MB DDR 400
DVD, CD-RW. NO FLOPPY (ug!)
2*9 GB Cheetah 18XL's
1*74 GB Raptor
1*WD 1200 JB

1*WD 2000JB on the network with some space for backing up data, shared MP3's, etc.

OS's: WinXP (for games), and Server 2003 (for doing stuff; I love working in the tech area at school and getting to use our school license - legally). I'd prefer to run both. In the past I've just put one OS one each Cheetah, and kept the 1200 JB for mass storage, settting the pagefile in the opposite Cheetah. Now that I've got the Raptor, I'm wondering if there's a better way. 9 GB's is a bit small for my OS and all my apps. But installing XP/S203 onto a system with no floppy (see tech support forum) is a pain. So, should I just install each OS onto the Cheetahs and run programs and pagefile from the Raptor? Should I partition the Raptor into 2 - one for pagefile/apps and one for mass storage?

Thoughts?

 

[blakerwry]

your OS should certainly go on the fastest drive - the raptor. Put temp storage/page file on the SCSI drives and bulk storage on the IDE.

 

[Howell]

Thoughts?

Palm-sized round objects are much easier to juggle.

 

[sechs]

You should probably start with only three drives, and work you way up. Try not to drop them... unless they're under warranty 8)

 

[Buck]

OSes on Raptor, pagefile on a Cheetah, and the 1200JB use as storage. If you use other applications that have additional scratch files, like Photoshop, use the second Cheetah for that purpose.

 

[Tea]

I'm with Buck.

 

[Howell]

Truthfully,
I've stopped playing around with this type of optimization. 1 drive for data, 1 drive for backups and vmware for testing.