Best HDD Configuration for Everyday Life & Media

[codeamatic]

I recently finished buying the parts for an I7 Build. For the new build I purchased 2 x 640GB and 1 x 1TB (external) which brought total number of hdd's to:

1 x WD Caviar Black (1TB in an external esata enclosure)
2 x WD Caviar Black (640GB)
1 x WD Passport (320GB usb2 external)
1 x WD non-sata (250GB)

PROBLEM:
My problem is, I don't know the best configuration for performance and security with the HDD's I already have.

My build will be used for ALL areas of web development including programming and design. There will not be a need to dual boot because I intend on using Win7 as my main OS and virtualbox for all other OS's. About 230 gigs of media (videos, music, etc) currently exist on the Passport, every other drive is empty.

Any help with where the OS should live as well as partitions, paging file, and backup would be extremely helpful. Actually the computer is built, I'm just looking for these answers before I can install anything. Thanks...

 

[buwish]

If you are looking for solid performance in regard to the OS and the programs you use, it may be worthwhile to set up your 2 Caviar Blacks in RAID 0. They are pretty good performing drives in their own right, so 2 together in RAID0 would be pretty speedy. You could probably just use the others then for storage however you would like.

 

[codeamatic]

Yeah I've been doing some research on that and I think that will probably be the way I go. I'm just a bit unsure of how to partition the drive. Should I partition the 640's with a partition for the OS, a partition for the pagefile and then an extra partition (for say web development based files)? Should program files be in the same partition as the OS or a different partition? I was thinking about using the 250Gig for backups...

 

[BlueCat57]

Unbelievable! codeamatic has almost the exact same harddrives and questions that I have.