partitions, Vcache, and speed

[Monaco]

My main drive is in 2 chunks, win98 on a FAT32 chunk and W2K on an NTFS chunk. Should I put W2K's virtual memory cache on the same drive the OS is on, or the other one? I've messed with it a bit- Sandra says that the NTFS chunk gets a score of 83528, and the FAT32 chunk gets a score of only 10000 or so.

It's only an ATA66 drive- so any extra speed I can wring out of it is a good thing.:)

Is this just Sandra playing games with me, or are these 2 partitions really working at 2 different speeds?

[Jon]

Considering one partition is on the inner portion of the disk and the other is on the outer portion, you are going to get different scores.

The inner portion (closest to the center) is going to be much faster than the outer regions of the disk.

Also, NTFS carries slighly more overhead on it than does FAT32, making it a little slower. I would say your speed differences have more to do with disk location though.

Moving your swap file really isn't going to make any noticeable difference to you...I would just leave it where it is.

[Yodums]

I would recommend it in the NTFS ...

Considering it is faster and your Sisoft is reporting better marks for it.


Other than that Jon is right you won't notice much of a difference.

[Monaco]

So hard drives work in CLV? makes sense, I guess...I do think that since the NTFS chunk had scores more than eighty times the FAT32 chunk, Sandra may be screwing around.

How to tell which chunk is where on the drive? I made the FAT32 part first, is that on the inside of the drive?

[Jon]

Should be on the inside.

I also wouldn't use Sandra to test drive performance...it's a horrible benchmark.

HDTach or ATTO disk benchmark are much, much better.

[Monaco]

I never understood how the Sandra drive benchmark worked either. IT seems to just make numbers up out of thin air:)

HD Tach is great, but won't run in NT unless you buy the full version. Which I can't afford. Where can I find this ATTO you speak of, and, is it free?

[Monaco]

Got it-

http://www.attotech.com/

don't see anything on the page that looks like a benchmark- do you know which file it is on the /software page?

edit: looks like you have to pay...bummer:(