Building a Gaming PC

No, but several gigs worth will save game saves, important documents and music/videos, for the average user that is.

I am banking on not everyone here using 7.5TB of space =P.
 
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Hescominsoon said:
true..but partitioning has it's own drawbacks:

Partitioning is a throwback to dos and in the modern Windows file systems this is actually a hindrance. What partitioning does now is now you have 1 MFT per partition. The MFT is the master file table which is basically a database of where all the files are located on the partition. Every partition you put on the disk,l you now have another MFT to worry about. This also introduces a performance overhead since if you access partition 2 on drive one the hard drive has to head to the second MFT..look it up and then go find the file. Also if you copy a file form partition one 2 partition 2 now the system has to physically move the bits from one partition to the other partition on the same drive AND update two MFT's. If everything is on the same partition then moving the files is merely a function of updating the one MFT and it's done. The performance gain is not trivial..try moving a gigabyte of files on a partitioned drive between partitions and then do it on a non-partitioned drive. The difference is night and day.
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i'm quite aware of how it works :) listen, i'm not saying there's *no* positive use for an extra drive, however it isn't *necessary* in this scenario and he'd be better off investing his money in something more performance driven such as faster memory or if anything, an additional drive for the purpose of going RAID-0.

it's a gaming machine...the goal is the most effective speed for the cost and spending money on a drive to speed a file move operation or for 'backup' (although that didn't add up) isn't the best way to spend the money.
 
You guys sure seem to be going all nuts over a $36 part... sheesh!

Games take an incredibly long time to install with all the patches and save games and what not. It seems to me that paying $36 for the convenience of having a separate game drive from the OS makes a ton of sense. I hate reinstalling games but I love the thought of being able to reinstall my OS from time to time as they seem to degrade after a while and the option for a much less painful refresh seemed great. There are other nice benefits of having your games on a D:/...the OS reinstall was one of them.

If you don't want the D:/games drive then leave it out, not a big deal.
 
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ewoksrule said:
You guys sure seem to be going all nuts over a $36 part... sheesh!

Games take an incredibly long time to install with all the patches and save games and what not. It seems to me that paying $36 for the convenience of having a separate game drive from the OS makes a ton of sense. I hate reinstalling games but I love the thought of being able to reinstall my OS from time to time as they seem to degrade after a while and the option for a much less painful refresh seemed great. There are other nice benefits of having your games on a D:/...the OS reinstall was one of them.

If you don't want the D:/games drive then leave it out, not a big deal.
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I generally don't install anything on my secondary drives. Too many apps love to place stuff in the registry, so once you reinstall things just wont work.
 
which defeats the purpose of partitioning..just use an external hdd for critical data backup..which was in my original quote..:)
 
qft
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Of course it take like a total of 10 seconds to back up your registry in preparation for a reinstall...but yeah cancel on the extra drive, just go with one big one Aaron.
 
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ewoksrule said:
Of course it take like a total of 10 seconds to back up your registry in preparation for a reinstall...but yeah cancel on the extra drive, just go with one big one Aaron.
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ehhh, half the reason for a reinstall is so that you can remove the bloat out of the registry.
 
ewoksrule said:
Of course it take like a total of 10 seconds to back up your registry in preparation for a reinstall...but yeah cancel on the extra drive, just go with one big one Aaron.
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i would *really* not recommend restoring a registry to a new build. unless you only pick a few keys...ok, but otherwise you're asking for it ;) there are definitely a few games where you can get away with it...WoW being one, and that is why it's vastly superior than lolhammer.
 
nattyg said:
i would *really* not recommend restoring a registry to a new build. unless you only pick a few keys...ok, but otherwise you're asking for it ;) there are definitely a few games where you can get away with it...WoW being one, and that is why it's vastly superior than lolhammer.
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lol..... no.
:D
 
Odale said:
lol..... no.
:D
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Hey guys, don't derail the thread with a WoW v. WAR debate. Take it to another thread.

/me mutters and continues downloading the MegaTen Online closed beta
 
vibrokatana said:
I generally don't install anything on my secondary drives. Too many apps love to place stuff in the registry, so once you reinstall things just wont work.
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I have said this before, the way you set up Your pc is for YOU no one else, if its easier for you then do it, that simple.

@ vibrokatana, nothing wrong with secondary drives, if you don't put anything on them WHY Have them, and as for certain programs not reinstalling, thats the OS Registry recognizing the Game/Software is still installed, also a easy fix, run regedit and delete the key left there NOTE**Not recommended unless you know what your doing as this can mess up your OS**
Everything you install leaves some trace, Usually more than that after its deleted, not cleaning house[hard drive house that is] will cause problems eventually:)
 
Blackbeard said:
I have said this before, the way you set up Your pc is for YOU no one else, if its easier for you then do it, that simple.

@ vibrokatana, nothing wrong with secondary drives, if you don't put anything on them WHY Have them, and as for certain programs not reinstalling, thats the OS Registry recognizing the Game/Software is still installed, also a easy fix, run regedit and delete the key left there NOTE**Not recommended unless you know what your doing as this can mess up your OS**
Everything you install leaves some trace, Usually more than that after its deleted, not cleaning house[hard drive house that is] will cause problems eventually:)
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I have secondary drives for backups and media. I download backups daily from some of my projects. Since I wipe windows about every 2-3 months it is much more handy to have separate drives/partitions. Admittedly the need for my Raid 1 has decreased a bit with DropBox and LiveMesh, but I still like to have things on a fault tolerant system.

And you don't need to preach to me about the registry. I have never had issues installing programs in windows due to the registry. The problem is that programs love to store data there, which makes it totally unportable. While backing up the registry might help in that aspect, it is more damaging then anything unless you want to go through and search for each individual key.
 
I agree 100% about backing up the registry, might as well do a fresh install, however it can be kept clean if you know how to do it, and I was not intending on Preaching :p If it sounded that way, all my backups are on Dvd-Rw[yes I have a lot], I opted for Raid 0 but have had little problems, really looking forward to Windows 7 :)
 
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