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Okay heres the deal.

In about an hour (hurry up fedex! ) My new 36z15 15k 36.7g drive, LSI controller and rounded/terminated cable will be here.

Now this is going to be a hella fast drive and I want to make the best of it.

What I've got now:

1x wd800bb: C: 5g---WinXP install and miscellanious apps D: 30g File Backups (mp3/movies/drivers et al) E: Game Installs

This drive is filled to bursting and I still have half my dvd collection to rip and a few games not yet installed.

Now I'm also getting another of the same drive (thanks nexus! ) so here's what I'm planning.

WinXP---5g on the 15k scsi drive.
Newer/more load time critical games (ie mafia/bf1942/hitman2/UT2K3)---~29G on scsi

All Other Game installs---wd800bb#1 ~40g
Movies/MP3/Game Files/Drivers---rest of wd800bb#1 and all of #2 for total of ~110g

Sound good or should I just back everything up to CD and stripe the 2 wd800bb's?

I should point out that even with only 2meg cache this drive is hella perky (32xxx in sandra) so it's not as if I'm going to be too slowed down whatever I do...


*edit* just realized...does anyone know if XP install supports the Symbios/LSI 53c1010 (hypermicro deal...free with any ibm 15k drive) I only ask because I dont think I even own a floppy drive anymore

You would have to press F6 to load RAID drivers when XP setup starts probably.

Now as to the partitioning:

It's up to you really. I personally have a 4.4GB (Windows and Apps), 7.8GB (Games), 80.5GB (MP3s, Movies, Drivers etc.), 4.39GB (Personal files) and 15GB of unpartitioned space (for a Linux distro someday) on my 120GB RAID0 array. Def. put WinXP and the newer games on the SCSI drive, might even throw a 2GB or so partition on the SCSI for a swap file. As for striping the two WD disks, it's up to you. I personally enjoy RAID but then again if one of my drives fail, I'm out of luck on like 50GB of MP3s, Movies, Files, and everything.

I'm running RAID-0 as well on two 40gig 7D40x Maxtor drives. Partitioning looks somethin' like this:

C:\Windows - 4gig
D:\Games - 13gig
E:\Music - 14gig
F:\Movies 42gig

and then I have a spare 15gig for MISC stuff like patches, files I'm currently downloading in KaZaA, drivers, etc. I would personally stripe the drives, but thats just me. I've never had a problem with drives failing on me (except one... and it was maxtor so maybe I should worry? ). Good luck with SCSI... ....I'm currently undecided on wheather I should give it a whack or not. Let us now if it makes a noticable improvement in normal everday operations/gaming

Well I've had XP and the more load time critical games on this drive for about a day now.

I'm not really sure the drive is working at its full potential.

First off storage review lists this drive as the fastest and hottest drive yet made. I can't even hear it over my casefans (granted theyre loud case fans...vantec tornados 2x80mm 1x92mm a panaflo h1a and a 6krpm on cpu) and even during heavy drive use its room temp to the touch (again behind 2 tornado 80mms but still...)

I've read all the threads at SR and it seems outside of one benchmark (atto) there shouldnt be any performance probs in XP but it just doesnt feel as "snappy" as I remember my 10k drives being in 2k

Game load times are marginally improved over my wd800bb but boot times feel the same.

all bios/controller/jumper/cabling is correct so it must be something OS related.

I'll probably reinstall 2k/sp3 and see what that brings but I'm kind of tired of os reinstalls (5 today and counting...)

Sandra scores are only 35000 when they should be in the 43000 range.