by congo » Fri Dec 08, 2006 1:17 am
You wouldn't ever notice any speed advantage that might come from placing the sim on the OS drive.
There are so many drive configurations possible Alrot, including RAID as you have two drives the same size.
Consider also that buying a larger hard drive would boost performance more than any partitioning options would. (other than raid)
Hard disk performance has such a minimal impact on FS9/X performance that it's hardly worth a mention. Hard disk performance matters more when you do a lot of large file operations, such as backup operations and huge file transfers, which is what I do frequently.
I always have two operating systems installed on seperate HDD's in case Windows dies on me, but XP is so stable these days, it hardly seems to be an issue. One thing I do like about having two systems installed, is that I can experiment and do things I would normally be too scared to do if I only had one Op Sys.
If it was me, I'd get a 160gb HDD or larger and RAID-0 the two 80gb drives together, install windows on the raid array and the new drive, partitioning 20gb/140gb on the new drive. Use the RAID-0 array as my main boot drive and keep everything duplicated onto the new 160gb HDD. That would not suit everyone though, it's just the way I do it. I keep the backup drive unplugged except during the backup.

Mainboard: Asus P5K-Premium, CPU=Intel E6850 @ x8x450fsb 3.6ghz, RAM: 4gb PC8500 Team Dark, Video: NV8800GT, HDD: 2x1Tb Samsung F3 RAID-0 + 1Tb F3, PSU: Antec 550 Basiq, OS: Win7x64, Display: 24&