Hi all, first of all, congratulations for this wonderful site!

I am about to set up a new machine, aimed for gaming and work (I am a games reviewer so games and work can be mixed at any time!).

The new PC will have two SATA hard disks of 160 GB each. I want to setup them as a single unit in RAID 0 mode.

My doubts are about partitions. I always have preferred to have two or three hard disks instead of partitions: one for documents (and swap file), one for operative system and "normal apps" (Office, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, FTP, etc, etc), and another for games.

With this new setup and after reading some interesting articles here, I was wondering how to take advantage of RAID 0 and perhaps, at the same time, partitions. As I wiil have a single "logic" disk under RAID 0, should I partition the disk to mimic the setup I am used to work with? I am even thinking of puting a smaller third non RAIDed SATA disk for the swap file, but perhaps I'll be gaining enough speed from the RAID 0.

What do you think of my plans? I need a very powerful PC, so I would like to hear what would be the ideal setup under these circumstances.

The complet setup is as follows:

Prescott 3,4 Ghz
1 GB RAM DDR2 533
Motherboard ASUS P5GDC DELUXE Socket 775
2 x 160 GB HD SATA (RAID 0)
Graphic card ATI X800XT

Many thanks!

BrigVet

I've not worked with RAID 0, only 1, but I hear it boosts performance--but you are doubling your risk of HDD failure because if one HDD goes, it takes the other one with it in terms of access to data.  So I'd say the third HDD should be of good size to hold regular backups of your RAID 0 (Ghost images  ;) ).

(Ghost I believe will create an image of a RAID 0 system, but it will not 'clone' image-to-disk and recreate the RAID 0 setup to a new pair of HDD's if you need to replace a HDD that has failed.  I think you have to re-create the RAID 0, and then you would have to restore each partition separately.)

Also, with that amount of RAM, you may not really access the swap file much.  You still need it because many programs, when loading, place a preliminary file structure there reserving space in case the program gets swapped, but then the program never needs to use that space.  But for performance, they say to put the swap file on a separate HDD at the begining of the HDD.  My third HDD is partitioned as:  Swap File/Temp File/Ghost Bkups.

I redirect system temp, user temp, and internet temp files to the Temp File partition.  These files change frequently and this helps slow the fragmentation on the OS partition.

Good to have a separate partition for your Documents, Email files, etc. that is kept separate from the OS partition.  If you have a bad install of a program, or whatever, you can restrore the OS partition without overwriting your Documents, etc. and thus loosing whatever has been added since the last time you made the backup.

Again, I'm not really a 'gamer', but if you really need 'performance', I understand you can tweak Windows to boost game response, but it may not represent the best setup for a 'general purpose' work system.  You may want to consider a dual booting system (need at least two partitions), with dual installation of your Windows OS so one system is tweaked for games and the other for general purpose use.  Rad's guides here talks about that in terms of separating video editing system from a general purpose system.

Thanks for your comment, NightOwl. I have purchased a third disk (200 GB ATA), which I will partition and use for keeping a ghost image of the OS disk and also for work documents.

I think I'll have plenty of power by now, the machine needs formatting, installing, etc, etc (and I have a copy of Half Life 2 in the wings also), so maybe after a week of use I'll se if I am happy with the setup!

Cheers!