disk partition scheme for bootcamp, Photoshop scratch disk disk

I am interested in seeing the replies here as I will doing something similar. But I think 200+ GB for a Windows partition is probably not so good. Wouldn't it be better to keep Windows to something like 20-50 GB, and then install Windows program files on yet another partition? It is a bit cleaner that way if you ever have to wipe/reinstall Windows.

My question would be if you do create a separate partition for Windows programs, I am assuming it has to be either NTFS or FAT32 formatted?

/mark

 

What's your backup strategy?

 

What kind of drive is the 750? I've had bad luck with drives over 500GB. Even the 1TB drives use two 500's usually.

 

FWIW, this is what I am going to be doing. I got my new MP OCT 2.8 yesterday. Its currently got the 320gb WD drive.

Install 750 Samsung F1 as boot drive and OS
Install 2x 74gb Raptor drives as raid-0 and use for DV camcorder and iMovie stuff.

Use 320gb WD drive for bootcamp and Vista Ultimate

I have a WD 320gb Mybook for the backup

Just my 2pence worth. I have no idea how good software raid is with OSX though.

-casw1000
fold4life.com

 

I have a more general question... At what level of use a speed increase from having different hard drives for the OS/Applications and files become noticeable? Does it only help users of large (>100 Mb) files? I personally only use medium sized files (1-10 Mb) for Photoshop/Illustrator and Powerpoint. Will I see a difference?

 

meh, most programs write SOME data to the c drive no matter where they're installed, so keeping windows on a separate partition might not save you as many software reinstalls as you think.

 

Yes, NTFS. I have Vista home premium on my second HD(250gb) And it formatted in NTFS.

 

You are absolutely right. It really doesn't make sense in the Windows world. It does, however, makes sense to use a different "physical" disk (not a different partition on the same physical disk) for your Windows scratch/page files.

 

I finally got my hands on a Samsung Spinpoint F1 750GB 3G SATA drive. It's giving me only 70MB/s READ speeds. That's not even close to Tom Hardware's published 119MB/s READ speeds.

On the other hand the Western Digital WD7500AYYS 750GB 3G SATA drive produced 96MB/s READ and WRITE. And the small random read/writes were faster than the comparable Samsung, Seagate, and Hitachi drives. Since this model is the enterprise RE2 with 24/7 service rating, I plan to use it as my primary boot drive.

I'm thinking of using a dual 10K Raptor SATA drives (150G each x 2) -- which I already own -- for my Photoshop scratch volume, though if money were no object, I'd get two of those 15K SAS drives from Apple and the SAS RAID controller.

But even more important than scratch drive is loading up with as much memory as you can afford. I have 16 GB (8 x 2GB FB-DIMMs). If I could afford it, I'd get 32GB (8 x 4GB FB-DIMMs). Mac OS X Leopard will use all the memory you have to create a "faux" scratch area for Photoshop CS3 even though memory cache is limited to 3.2GB.

 

that's true, if it's a fast disk you might see a speed increase on some things.