how should I set up my HDDs?

[Forgetful]

Over the next couple weeks I have decided to upgrade to windows 7. I do not want to simply "upgrade", but rather wipe everything and do a fresh install.

I have never really known the correct way to set up the different HDDs in a computer.

I have a 250gb WD, and two 1TB WD.

My thoughts where to put Windows 7 on the 250gb, install the programs on the first 1 TB and then use the last 1TB drive a scratch/cache disk for Maya, zbrush, realflow etc.

Should I perhaps install all the programs on the same drive as the OS; and use first TB for music and content?

Please good sirs, your thoughts.

 

[SkaarjMaster]

I would install OS with programs on the 250GB drive and music, games, etc. on the 1TB drive and use 2nd TB drive as backup only. Of course, I would then buy another 250GB HD (or slightly more) and use it to backup my OS/programs HD.

 

[Crowze]

It depends which drive is fastest. If you have two identical 1TB drives, I would be sorely tempted to put them in RAID 0.

Likewise... if your important data will fit on the 250GB drive, use it as a backup and have everything else on the two 1TB drives in RAID0. I'd still put programs and data in separate partitions though, but that's more down to preference.

 

[Zur]

One logic would be to have small high-speed drives inside the computer and a high-capacity external to store data that you won't need to access often. It depends on what your requirements are though.

Putting the two drives in RAID 0 as suggested above would give a boost to access times. However, you have to be prepared to backup often as the reliability of storage is effectively divided by half since one failure is enough to trash data.

 

[Forgetful]

Isn't there a type of raid that uses 3 drives and one of them is some type of master? I'm open to any suggestions. Price (to a certain extent is also not a large concern).

Data corruption is not something I want to have to think about. I do a lot of rendering for both video and 3D composites. I wouldn't want any of that data going sour.

 

[Kaleena]

I personally use one HDD (the smallest) for the OS and small apps (like firefox/opera, msn etc), one HDD for the swap file + the storage (videos, music...) and a last one for the games and heavy apps (if I had maya or photoshop I'd put them on it). I also defragment very often (especially the OS one).

If you don't want to try RAID you could always do the same. But there are indeed some safer types of RAID.

 

[Cr4zyB4st4rd]

I have 3 TB drives in my syste and have them set up as follows

TB1: OS/light programs, ones that don't take up tons of space or rely on the disk for a lot of scratch space or stuff/documents

TB2: Games/Heavy programs (adobe/3d stuff etc)/Backups

TB3: Files/Backups
I could have gone raid, but with 3 drives i can spread scartch disks/temp space/page files over the 3 so that each program gets best performance, i dont see any requirements in RAID speed increases considering according to reviews my drives are the fastest HDD's there are.

 

[NRG]

Isn't there a type of raid that uses 3 drives and one of them is some type of master? I'm open to any suggestions. Price (to a certain extent is also not a large concern).

Data corruption is not something I want to have to think about. I do a lot of rendering for both video and 3D composites. I wouldn't want any of that data going sour.

RAID 3, stripped disks with parity. If one of any of the three disks fail, it can be replaced and rebuilt based on on data from the remaining two discs--that's the easiest way to describe it. Obviously requires three or more drives.

You can do it with different sized hard drives because the partitions on them is what needs to be the same. (Same goes for RAID 0 or 1) Because your smallest drive is 250GB, that's going to be your limiting factor for the size of the RAID partition. In RAID 3, you lose about one-third of space of the partition for parity data. That basically means a 250GB RAID3 setup will appear roughly as 180GB when viewed in Windows. If you use four disks, you'll lose about a fourth, five disks loses a fifth, and so on.

If I were you, I'd probably just install the OS and most common programs on the 250GB. Then, I'd probably mirror (RAID 1) 500GB or so from the two large hard drives for data that I don't want to lose. The remaining 1TB from both would just be games and crap that takes up a lot of space but is replaceable.

You can easily do software-level RAID and partition expansion/shrink right from Windows in realtime. Except for the primary partition which Windows is installed on, you can't do much to that.

 

[Forgetful]

my main board has a raid controller on it, but I've never set up raid before at all.