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how fat is windows XP ?

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The reason I break up my main hard drive with the OS on one dedicated 15gig partition is to be able to have a smaller ghost image. My OS and Adobe takes up 8.5 gigs right now resulting in only a 4gig backup image. I would not want to make a ghost of the entire C drive if its got 30-40 gigs of data. I then have two more seperate paritions dedicating one to store the ghost images and the other to store games. Also there is no where to store back up images if you only have one partition. And for good measure I have 15gig slave seperated into a small 2 gig page file partition and the rest for storage.
Paritions or slaves are way better and faster than using disks for Norton Ghost.
 
I have a total of 120 gigs and separate them equally. It seems, it is a matter of taste. Having your paging file on separate physical drive if possible is a good idea and as a backup drive.
My current setup is [C]Moe:\main with installs [D]Larry:\My documents(redirected) and the backups(I use HPA backup) [E]Curly:\Pagefile, Photoshop scratch disk and other temp locations(surfing files, downloads and such till they get a home, basically my dirty drive. It is a separate physical drive from the C: and D: drives. Hope this makes sence.
 
Having stuff in different partitions on the same drive makes windows softwares try to access them simultaniuesly as different harddrives, and has the os core to make the partitions "take turns" in reading data, its wasting a bit of cpu time, and its wasting a little time. However, i doubt it to be that much that its noticable, when comparing to having the same files, on the same drive, simultaniuesly accesed within the same partition. Compared to having the same files on independent physicaly seperated partitions there is a performance loss, obviuesly. My main reason for not creating multiple partitions on a drive is pretty basic tho... as you create more partitions you get more wasted space... aka, space you never will be able to use, the last few 100Mb, or the last 2-3Gb and so on... it can turn out to a bunch of lost Gb system wide, and, well, im greedy with my space. i have Dedicated drives for just about everything. the onlything i wish i could afford, is two large Raptors, or heck, one large, one small... big for system and softwares, and small for swap.. kinda feels like overkill to go with highend scsi for a 2-3Gb swap drive i think the raptor way would be a nice trade of on speed / price

B!
 
-=Mr_B=- said:
Having stuff in different partitions on the same drive makes windows softwares try to access them simultaniuesly as different harddrives, and has the os core to make the partitions "take turns" in reading data, its wasting a bit of cpu time, and its wasting a little time. However, i doubt it to be that much that its noticable, when comparing to having the same files, on the same drive, simultaniuesly accesed within the same partition. Compared to having the same files on independent physicaly seperated partitions there is a performance loss, obviuesly. My main reason for not creating multiple partitions on a drive is pretty basic tho... as you create more partitions you get more wasted space... aka, space you never will be able to use, the last few 100Mb, or the last 2-3Gb and so on... it can turn out to a bunch of lost Gb system wide, and, well, im greedy with my space. i have Dedicated drives for just about everything. the onlything i wish i could afford, is two large Raptors, or heck, one large, one small... big for system and softwares, and small for swap.. kinda feels like overkill to go with highend scsi for a 2-3Gb swap drive i think the raptor way would be a nice trade of on speed / price

B!

Well yes - there can be a few GGbytes not used - but to me, now that I can get a hard disk for £50 that I will only half fill, why worry? As to disk access performance - the main customer machine I work with has a database spread over 6 disks each with a mirror, and when it's powered up (almost never of course) it virtually lifts off the floor. The pros and cons of slight performance improvements with PC disks & file systems are like comparing a Vectra and a Mondeo forgetting that F1 cars exist... :)
 
cats_five said:
when it's powered up (almost never of course) it virtually lifts off the floor.

That came out wrong - like it's almost never turned on! Of course I mean it's almost never turned off. It's got all sorts of duality & hot-swapable disks.
 
cats_five said:
Well yes - there can be a few GGbytes not used - but to me, now that I can get a hard disk for £50 that I will only half fill, why worry? As to disk access performance - the main customer machine I work with has a database spread over 6 disks each with a mirror, and when it's powered up (almost never of course) it virtually lifts off the floor. The pros and cons of slight performance improvements with PC disks & file systems are like comparing a Vectra and a Mondeo forgetting that F1 cars exist... :)

Well, i got aproximently 700Gb and no more money to get more drive space currently, and, well, im just about allways out of space...

As i said, there is ways to get faster drives then the raptors, but price / performance factor goes from bad, to worse. Im going to stick to my Pata drive for OS the next couple of years, for that reason.
B!
 
SomethingClever said:
or restict it's size by making the min and max allocations the same.
There is no reason to set a static pagefile. That does nothing, but remove one of the major benefits of having a pagefile which is the allocation of more space then is expected.
 
KoolDrew said:
There is no reason to set a static pagefile. That does nothing, but remove one of the major benefits of having a pagefile which is the allocation of more space then is expected.

A static page file was an effective tool with Win98 but I have not heard much about the benifits with XP. Never the less I would suppose it would still keep XP's page file from increasing and decreasing in size.
 
Never the less I would suppose it would still keep XP's page file from increasing and decreasing in size.

The pagefile only increases in size if it needs to be. If the mininum size is set high enough the pagefile will never need to be resized. There is NO benefit to setting a static pagefile.

I have also heard many times that if it is not set at a static size the pagefile will get fragmented.. A fragmented pagefile will have no affect on performance. This is because the pagefile is NOT read as a whole file (from one end to another). Instead it is accessed in very small chunks. And when I say very small I mean a few tens of a KB at a time. The pagefile is also not the only file involved with paging. Many other files such as .exe's and .dll's are also involved with paging, because of this the head of the hard drive is jumping all over the place anyway so fragmentation has no affect on performance and is irrelevant. Also under the most odd circumstances fragmentation of the pagefile may increase performance. Think about it. If the head is jumping all over the place and that little chunk in the pagefile that needs to be accessed is closer to the other data being accesses it would be faster. Again this not probably not be noticeable though.
 
I used to have 2 120gb drives in raid, and I loved the speed. Unfortunantly I love to reformat, and it hurt to back up 140+gb of stuff. Now, I have windows and proggies on an 80gb drive(I want a 36gb raptor for it, but it isnt cost effective) and a 120gb for other stuffs. I lost my other 120gb when I was poor and needed a video card and ram for my mother's pc.
 
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