Multiple Hard drives and XP question

If the drive is an old 10GB it would be a waste of time putting your O/S onto it.

The drive would be far too slow compared to your new 160GB unit.

The best thing to do would be to make a 20GB partition off the 160GB for your operating system and use the 10GB for a pagefile / swapfile disk.

its better if u keep ur 10gb for gathering the backup files. ... because if at anytime if u have to format ur main 160gb hdd .. u still have all imp. files saved in old hdd ... hope this info will help

what does a page file/swap file disk do?

by many it professionals it is recommended that you store your swap files on another partition or
disk, this in return will make the computer a little better in performance , swap files relates
to virtual memeory.

heres some sites to understand it better

http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,289893,sid9_gci213077,00.html


heres one that tells you a whole information plus tips on where to place swap files

http://www.kamputec.com/swap/

If the safety of you data is of paramount importance then i suggest you use the 160GIG as a backup drive. Unfortunately the integrity of the 10GIG is uncertain. If you can afford it, you may choose to  purchase a small drive say a 40GIG and use it for your operating system. It would certainly be faster than the 10GIG and more stable. In the end the, you data including MP3's would be safely on another drive in the event your main drive goes bad. (I had to learn this the hard way)

One thing to bear in mind if you are going to install the 10gig and 160gig in your machine is the impact the 10gig's performance will have on the 160gig.  When you look inside your PC you will usually find 2 ports on the motherboard, each capable of handling 2 hard disks/cdrom/dvd drives.  Although there are 2 devices attached to this, the PC can only talk to one at a time.  If you have both of your hard disks on the same cable and listen to an MP3 from your 10gig drive (which will probably be much slower than your new disk) the PC will finish reading the chunk of data from the file before switching back to your 160gig disk to continue caching webpages or working with any other type of document.  Each time it does this, the performance impact will be minor, however, when built up over a large period of time or doing anything intensive, you will find this more and more noticable.  I would personally do one of the following, a) ensure both disks are on completely different cables, b) ditch the 10gig hard disk and buy a cheap 30 or 40 from somewhere, c) ditch the 10gig and just have 1 hard disk or d) buy another controller card which can be quite cheap.

Hope this helps.

i dont use too many programs.. just the same ones frequently... so im thinking i should just put the os and partitions on one and media and downloadables on the other. cluster size? i set to default for each partition... good idea?? im not even sure what they are

No problem, since your files (downloads) are not so large it's good idea to use the default cluster size but if you're going to read/write large pieces of data from/to the disk it's better to use larger cluster size because it's faster to read/write larger chunk of data from/to the disk at each I/O operation.

What is clusters: http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid43_gci211801,00.html