New HD, partition and speed tweaks help

I just received a new storage drive for my PC. I've done a lot of searching here on setting it up and trying to tweak some extra performance out of my system. Currently I have an OS partition, Apps partition, and Data partition on Drive 1.

With the second drive, I was thinking about making 3 partitions, one for the OS swapfile, one for a PS scratch disk, and a large one for data. The data partition on Drive 1 would then be used to as a backup of the improtant data on Drive 2. Is this about the best I can do utilizing the two drives? Any other thoughts, suggestions (partition sizes for swap/scratch), or ideas?

Thx for the help!

Would having the page file and the PS scratch disk on different partitions really help? I can't see what advantage there would be over having them on the same partition. You only have one head to read at once, regardless of the partitions.

This is a genuine question for anyone out there, rather than a critiscism, as my new system arrived yesterday and I've just put PS Scratch and XP Pro pagefile on the same partition.

I've read somewhere on these forums that by partitioning an area for the swapfile and scratch disk will help reduce fragmentation on the drive by limiting the areas they can write to. If anything, it would allow for quicker defragmentation runs when you do need to do it.

I am not so sure about that being the case with the swapfile, as I seem to remember someone just setting the minimum and maximum swapfile size the same to limit/control the writing behavior.

Any thoughts on it being better to have the PS scratch disk on the drive with the OS and Apps versus the drive with the OS swapfile and the Data/picture files?

Damn, why didn't Santa just bring me a couple of raptors...

Having two partitions for swap and scratch will definitely prevent them from getting fragmented, but the biggest gain in perrformance will come from locating the swap and scratch on two seperate drives (and if you're using IDE, make sure they are on two different channels, not master & slave on the same channel).

I'd keep the scratch off the OS drive and leave the swap on the OS drive. But you also don't really want to put the scratch on the same drive as your data files since one of the prime times that scratch will be used is when loading large image files. Ideally a basic high performance setup will use three drives: (1)OS/Apps/Swap, (2)PS-Scratch/Misc, in two partitions, (3)Photostorage/working space. If you only have two drives, then put your working/storage space on the main drive.

If you create a fixed sized swap file (min=max) for the OS then you won't have to worry about it getting fragmented so it can safely reside in the same partition. Just make sure you defrag the OS drive before creating the fixed sized swap file or it may get created fragmented. Or just put it in another partition.

Fortunately all these swap and scartch files can easily be moved around after you build the system and using something like partition magic you can even make, change or remove partitions without loosing existing drive data. So don't be too concerned if you think you'll want to make changes later. It's definitely possible.

haydnw said:

Would having the page file and the PS scratch disk on different
partitions really help? I can't see what advantage there would be
over having them on the same partition. You only have one head to
read at once, regardless of the partitions.

This is a genuine question for anyone out there, rather than a
critiscism, as my new system arrived yesterday and I've just put PS
Scratch and XP Pro pagefile on the same partition.

Click to expand...

--
Kevin
http://blog.kevinmillsphoto.com

Thanks much for the post and the help

what about the temp files, window temp, PSG temp, spool files etc... would you have them on the same drive with the swap but different partition? or what?

what's the recommended partition size for the swap, is it 1.5 ram or 3x ram? I'm talking about partition not file size.
& what about the partition size for temp files?
dave

what if you put the Pagefile or the scratch disk on a secure disk, what I mean by that if the page file isn't accessable by any of the users but me, similar to my document security, would windows still use that drive for the swapfile while that user is using it?
may be I can make it clearer:

a user "X" doesn't have access to the drive E , every time he\she clicks on it, is says access denied, but the swapfile is on that drive, would windows be able to access that drive for the swapfile for that user?
Dave