Variety of drives in a desktop - optimal use?

[xandermac05]

I've presently got three HDDs in my Windows 7 (x64) machine, two of which were scavenged from broken hardware (because why the hell not?). The scavenged drives are obviously not amazing: one's an ancient 160 GB Samsung and the other's a 320 GB laptop Seagate. I'm rather indecisive about the best way to go about using them, though. My main performance task on this machine is gaming, so that's the thing that matters in terms of getting the most out of my setup. I assume that ideally it'd be best to have the OS, games, and page file on separate physical drives, but in this instance the drives vary hugely in performance so I'm not sure that would really apply. With 8 GB DDR3 RAM, I'm guessing the page file probably isn't too much of a worry, but please correct me if I'm really wrong there. Otherwise, I'm not entirely sure if I should be more concerned with the access & transfer speeds available to the OS or to the games themselves. I understand that primarily, games load assets before they are required (loading screens), but what about things like texture/object pop-in? Is that more of a VRAM issue, or a result of low access time?

The 160 GB drive probably isn't big enough to be hugely useful for any particular category of my data, but I suppose I could think of something. It'd be more than enough for the OS, of course, but I'm guessing the lower rotation speed would be a significant detriment to overall performance.

Basically, I'm looking for some opinions on how best to organise my physical drives and their partitions for optimal gaming performance.


Here's a benchmark of the three drives:


SAMSUNG SV1604E [160 GB 3.5" PATA, 5400 rpm]

Transfer Rate Minimum : 23.2 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 29.1 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 25.6 MB/sec
Access Time : 17.1 ms
Burst Rate : 27.4 MB/sec
CPU Usage : -1.0%


SEAGATE ST9320423AS [320 GB 2.5" SATA, 7200 rpm]

Transfer Rate Minimum : 47.7 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 96.6 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 75.6 MB/sec
Access Time : 16.9 ms
Burst Rate : 125.5 MB/sec
CPU Usage : -1.0%


SAMSUNG HD103SJ [1 TB 3.5" SATA, 7200 rpm]

Transfer Rate Minimum : 45.7 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 139.6 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 103.8 MB/sec
Access Time : 14.0 ms
Burst Rate : 121.0 MB/sec
CPU Usage : -1.0%

 

[WyomingKnott]

Throw out the Samsung 160 GB drive, or use it as a USB drive for backups.
Keep music files, pictures, and other things that don't require fast access to large amounts of data on the Seagate.
Install everything on the 1 TB drive.

I'm not just being sarcastic. Don't put things that you want quick access to on slower drives. For optimal performance, if I were in your seat, I'd keep only the 1 TB drive in the machine and use both of the others for backups. Unless I have more than 1 TB of "stuff," and then I would store slow "stuff" on the Seagate.

 

[xandermac05]

Throw out the Samsung 160 GB drive, or use it as a USB drive for backups.
Keep music files, pictures, and other things that don't require fast access to large amounts of data on the Seagate.
Install everything on the 1 TB drive.

I'm not just being sarcastic. Don't put things that you want quick access to on slower drives. For optimal performance, if I were in your seat, I'd keep only the 1 TB drive in the machine and use both of the others for backups. Unless I have more than 1 TB of "stuff," and then I would store slow "stuff" on the Seagate.

I'm considering using the 160 as an external, aye. I don't have very much space on the 1TB though, hence my keenness to utilise the 320 at least. If you reckon sticking games on it is stupid I'll maybe try using it for something else; perhaps game backups/installers/mods and the like...

Ta for the opinion.

 

[WyomingKnott]

I wouldn't go so far as to say stupid; there area lot of non-standard rigs set up to meed particular needs. I would just organize things so low-speed access things are on the slower drives. For example, I don't care about the speed of the drive my music is on. Any drive made in the last 15 years is fast enough to play music from. (I'm simplyifying; transcoding works better with fast drives).

I'm a little unusual in my own environment: I've got a storage case with ten bare drives, plus four on my desk, for backups and test builds and fiddling with RAID. There's an HDD that's in my machine simply so that I can boot DOS. But not everyone thinks buying drive after drive makes economic sense.