Partition planning

I've start a thread over at Aumha.net , regarding partition setup. My discussion is based on this article , wich I reccomend for everyone new to partitioning to read.

I haven't got too many replies, and I'm wondering if anyone would please shed some light on my questions either here or there.

In addition to my thread: Are there any programs you can think of that uses much temp space? Any special scenarios?

Thx.

 

A lot of the adobe graphic design products use a 'scratch disk'

With XP I understand it is generally faster to use only one volume on the disk where the OS is installed. Otherwise instead of being able to put things near to each other it has to seek to a seperate area outside this 'clump' of files every time it wants to access any data on another volume and then back for the OS. If your simultaneously accessing two or more volumes on the same disk that would be an extraordinary amount of time spent just seeking.
I wouldn't think it would make much difference to speed if a disk storing documents and data were divided into different volumes but then if that were all thats on it it would hardly serve any purpose to break it up into smaller volumes would it? We're not talking terabytes are we?

To offer some answers to your questions only one active pagefile per operating system per disk is recommended but put it on any volume you want or even all on top of each other remembering that if is is not on the active OS volume then it has to seek elsewhere and back each time it is used.
I'm not aware that using D:\ as opposed to D:\PROGRAM FILES\ would present any issue if on a seperate volume to everything else but your OS would likely run faster if the programs are on the same volume as the OS.
The temp folder for CD/DVD burning is different depending on the application in fact XP has many 'temp' folders in many different locations.

IMHO use just one volume per disk for speed. To increase speed use multiple disks with just one volume on each. For organisation or size optimisation you may beneift from using multiple volumes for that reason also but its still going to be better if they are also each on a seperate disk.