Installing 2 HD's

[marcothy]

I just bought 1 36.4 GB SATA 10k RPM HD, and a 74GB HD of same specs. I originally wanted to install them under a RAID 0 config, but I am not big on the fault issues and chance to lose data.

So, I was going to install my smaller HD as one for the OS and key files, and use the 2nd HD to install my most used programs (mostly games) and data.

First, with both of these HD's being new and clean, how should I go about installing them? I have installed single IDE HD's before. I just am not sure about using 2 HD's. My MB does have two SATA ports so I will not be piggy backing any connections on the MB. I know just enough about jumpers to do something stupid too.


On a side note, is it possible for me to have my OS on 1 HD, and put programs on the second HD? If so, is that a good idea for performance and stability? Or is it better to keep the programs and OS together on 1 HD?

Any help is greatly appreciated. And I do know more than I may make it sound-I am just trying to learn from the past when I have made mistakes and wished I had asked someone first.

Basically, if you had these 2 HD's, what setup would you do, and how would you go about installing them?

 

[golfing22]

To install two hard drives on a system all you have to do is look on the top of the drives and see how the jumpers work. It will show you in a picture where to put the jumpers. Just set one to Master and one to Slave.

I would personally install the OS on one drive and then use the other drive to put programs on. To do this just install the OS like normal and when ever you install programs like tell it to install on drive E instead of C

 

[Otmakus]

Yes, it is a good idea to install OS in one drive and the other in another drive. For more information on how to optimize ur hard disks, read this: http://partition.radified.com/

 

[iss]

I have two sata drives on my machine one for the OS and programs and the other for downloads and storage\backup.

 

[Samstoned]

one reason to put the os on a small partition like about 10gb is that is where most of your disk fragmentation will occur
obvious you will also get fragging as you swap and delete edit files
my system is setup like this
C; drive boot drive 10gb has os on it
D: storage for MS software and anything linked to OS
this drive above is 36 gb scsi
have 3 more same size all partitioned in to 2- 17gb drives
have 2 80 gb also split in half
last newest drive 160gb sata split 4 ways
all labeled for various things
last good reason data loss back it up save some space to put that system back togther

 

[SNGX1275]

You don't have to worry about jumpers on SATA drives.