I'm building a new gaming rig and will run either XP Pro or Vista 32bit. I have a few concerns about the hard drive. I considered getting a Raptor for the 10k RPMs but after reading a couple of articles I realized the "real world" speed isn't worth the extra money. So, basically, I am looking for ways to increase HD speed as much as possible. I'm looking into getting a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 with 7200RPMs, 32mb cache, Sata 3Gb/s. It will be on the primary Sata channel and will have a 40gb or so partition for the OS. I will then create a secondary partition for the Virtual Memory alone. I believe it's typically half the amount of physical RAM and min and max set as the same so its permanent? Any other partitions will be for storage. Is this a good idea? Are there any other ways to increase performance? Thanks. Windows XP Pro SP2 AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.0GHZ Venice Core Gigabyte GA-K8N-SLI Motherboard 1GB Geil DDR400 Dual Channel ATI Radeon X800 GTO Fireblade Edition 256MB DDR PCIE

Most people don't bother...they just let Windows handle things. There are some advantages to what you're considering but I don't know how much real world performance difference it actually makes. Supposedly, the best solution is to create a dedicted partition on a 2nd HDD. And don't make the partition too small. You don't mention how much RAM you're going to install but I never saw anything written stating "half the amount of physical RAM"...most recommend 1.5x. Then again, most articles were written before having 2-4GB RAM was common. I suggest you do some googling on the subject. Here's a couple links that I have saved on the subject: http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.co... http://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_opt...

Don't create a partition for the pagefile on the *same* physical drive, since it will only make things *worse* because the drive arm has to move back and forth frequently between the partitions. I suggest you simply use the unpartitioned drive and not worry too much about the page file. Set it to a static size to prevent its fragmentation. If you really insist on creating a separate partition for it, then the only sensible option is to do it on a different *physical* drive which can yield slight performance benefits. As for drive performance, don't worry too much. Go for the *largest capacity* you can afford, with 7200rpm and 16MB or higher cache. In real life usage, that's more than sufficient, since the higher bit density on the platters for larger drives will help towards performance (the drive arm has to move less to read the same amount of data).

Your motherboard is certainly able to manage RAID0. GigaByte 3D Aurora Asus P5WDHDeluxe RAID 0 Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 2GB DDR2 Twin2X 800MHz BFG nVidia 8800 GTS 512

yeah a dedicated OS partition is rumored to yield slightly lower access times. a 32mb cache > 16mb cache volume-control is right about the page file partition though - if you put it on the same physical disk there's no point in using a different partition - the HDD arm needs to move back and forth between OS and Page File, so if they're on the same disk this'll hurt R/W speeds. 10k rpms are faster than 7200rpm, but they have a higher failure rate. Raid 0 is another way to increase HDD performance, but it further decreases fault tolerance because if EITHER drive fails, the whole partition is lost (and all data from both drives). So you don't wanna store important data on a Raid0 partition, especially if it's a raid of 10k disks.