I would like some advice on setting up partitions on my drives. The system I am building will have two physical harddrives. One is a 30G IBM Deskstar and the other is an 80G Western Digital with an 8MB cache.I want to keep the OS (Win XP) on its own partition separate from any other program files. I also want to keep all my SIMS (FS2K2, CFS2, Trainsim) on the other physical drive using the most efficient partitioning)Will the 8MB high performance cache on the WD drive be the best option for the OS itself?Can anyone recommend any reading that I might do about setting up partitions or does anyone have any insight as to what might make the most sense? I know 80G is a very large drive and I don't want to waste a lot of it using inefficient partitions. Thanks!!John-PaulToronto

Quick down and dirty answer from me would be to split them into three's.Why? Works for me. One part for OS, one for Application types, one for data. The rest? Just for fun! :) I have twin 60gig WD's. Plus with the modern tools available, you can move partitions every which way (Partition Magic by Power Quest) so you'll never be stuck with something you don't like.Do partition some though...loosing one 80gig part is a giant bummer!Cheers,bt

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think you can use the disk manager tool in Windows XP to create partitions. The easiest way as bt said is to use Partition Magic.Personally I use good old FDISK, unless you're familiar with it, I'd rule against using it. I have a 60GB drive, it's partitioned into 6 10GB sections, I find this works well for me, but it may not for you. You can always merge two partitions that you create later on if you need to.

Hi John,you say you partitioned you drive into 10GB chunks. Now, my FS folder is already pushing that. I've heard that lots of people run their add-on sceneries from different partitions. Would that have an impact on performance? If not, it would certainly make file management much easier. Any opinions on this would be greatly appreciated.Cheers,Gosta.

Hi Gosta,Mine is also pressing that 10GB :-lol I am yet to try running add-on scenery from another partition, but I don't think it would really impact on performance, because everything is on the same physical drive. If there was any impact, I'd say it would be minimal.If you have more than one drive, FS was on one partition on disk A and the add-ons were on another partition on disk B, then I think performance issues would arise.

Hi John,I'm thinking of completely re-doing my computer with two OS, WinXP for standard use and Win98 for FS, maybe on the weekend... (although I'm dreading the prospect). I'll try the partition and see what happens. Another question, this time about the swap file. I assume, that is kept on the drive where Windows is installed. But will it be used for all files Windows accesses, no matter from which drive, or does each partition have it's own swap file? (I only found the option of setting an overall amount, it didn't tell me where it's kept, though.)Cheers,Gosta.

Hi all,I just found an old HD and installed it on my machine as a slave - it's a whopping 1.2GB (actually, I'm exaggerating - it's 1.18GB).Any suggestions as to what to use it for?Cheers,Gosta.

MS recommends for optimal performance the swap file be placed on a drive other than the boot or OS drive. As to your other question, you can have multiple swap files, on multiple drives, but they are treated as a virtual "one".Best,bt

Excellent! Thanks for the quick response and clear explanation. I will keep this in mind. Now, if I placed the swap file on my 'newly acquired' 1.2GB drive, would a possible improvement in performance be cancelled out by the fact that the drive is slower than my main drive?Cheers,Gosta.

Actually those 1.2-1.8GB drive are not easy to come by. If you have an older computer that can't handle the larger drives, I would use it on it.

This may answer your questions better than I.http://www.pcguide.com/opt/opt/osSwapLocation-c.htmlNote: That little 1.2 would make an EXCELLENT Partition only drive.Cheers,bt

Thanks Braun! Your help is greatly appreciated. I'll read through the article, and see, if I can make up my mind...Cheers,Gosta.

Thanks for the info, I did not know that, but before I installed it, I tried to find out from the web how big it was, and saw Quantum 1.6GB drives advertised for quite a lot of money, $40-$50. I thought it was a mistake, but now I know why. I'll definitely keep it now, even though I don't have an older computer.Also, I read the article Braun suggested, and tried to use it for virtual memory, as the article suggested it should be at the beginning of the drive. (I found a large swap file compensates a bit for my low amount of RAM). As the drive is considerably slower than modern ones, I still noticed an improvement as well as degradation of performance at the same time. No, I'm not on drugs, so please allow me to explain: FS runs very smoothly, but pauses suddenly to quickly load textures etc, while previously it wouldn't give me actual pauses, but stutters, where the picture freezes, but the simulation continues, i.e. the next frame the plane has leaped forward quite a bit. This, as you can imagine, is very annoying, especially during landing, so I think I prefer the pauses over the stutters, at least the simulation picks up where it left off half a second ago. Thanks to all of you for your helpful suggestions,Cheers,Gosta.