Member Avatar for zzmster

Having read several partitioning I keep seeing different opinions on the matter of location of the files folder and or swap files. The need and essence of proper and smart partitioning of drives is clear to me.

However I can't figure out where to place the more demanding part of the program file folder i.e. , Premiere, for maximum performance and output.

I have seen that most people tend to leave a 20-30 GB for in the OS partition [C:], some people make an seperate partition for programs on the OS drive [D:] and some people assign a different for the programs folder.

Which is best ?

Should programs folder be:

A: on the first partition of drive 1 (together with OS)

B: on the second partition of drive 1 (first beeing OS)

C: on the second partition of drive 2 (first beeing operating system page file).

It seems logical in some way to put it on the second drive, as far as efficiency goes; drive 1 runs OS while drive 2 is smoothly running Programs.

Ideas anynone ?

Specs;

Asus P5-AD2
P4 3.4
Corsair 5400 1Ghz

Drive 1: 74 GB IDE
Drive 2: 74 GB IDE

Drive 3: 120 GB Sata

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by nizzy1115

Dani AI

Generated

Short answer: put the OS and commonly used programs on the fastest physical disk, and put scratch/cache/project files on a different physical disk. Partitioning a single physical drive into multiple volumes helps organization and reduces some fragmentation, but it does not give real I/O parallelism — only separate spindles do. is right that separate drives give a measurable, but not huge, boost; the biggest wins come from separating competing read/write workloads (OS/apps vs. scratch/media) onto different physical drives.

Given your hardware (Drive1: 74GB IDE, Drive2: 74GB IDE, Drive3: 120GB SATA) a practical layout is:

  • Drive3 (120GB SATA): OS + Program Files. Use one partition sized to leave 20–30% free for growth and updates.
  • Drive2 (74GB IDE): Photoshop/Premiere scratch disks and Premiere media cache. Keep this dedicated to temporary I/O.
  • Drive1 (74GB IDE): Project files, source media and archive. Keep large, sequential reads off the OS disk.

Why this works: the SATA drive will give fastest boot/app load times if the OS and executables live there. Scratch and cache cause heavy, frequent writes — they benefit most from being on their own spindle so they do not contend with the OS. Project/media on a separate drive keeps large sequential reads/writes away from system I/O.

Practical tips and cautions:

  • Set Photoshop scratch and Premiere media/cache explicitly to the dedicated drive (Preferences).
  • Keep 15–30% free on system and application partitions for performance and defragmentation headroom.
  • Move large media libraries off the system drive; do not manually move Program Files folders after install (use installers or junctions only if you understand the risks).
  • If you later add an SSD, move OS+Programs to the SSD and keep scratch/media on separate HDDs or a RAID array for streaming.

This layout balances responsiveness (apps/OS) and sustained I/O (scratch/media) for photo/video work on your mix of IDE and SATA drives.

Member Avatar for nizzy1115

You might see a slight improvement of speed by putting them on 2 seperate hard drives. However, it wont be huge, becasue lots of the files have to get written to the main os drive no matter what. I have found that even different partitions of the same hard drive help with performance because it helps the drives from becoming fragmented as easily.

My setup
200 gb hd1 -> 50 gb os, 50 gb programs, 100 gb storage
200 gb hd2 -> 100 gb music, 100 gb video
80 gb hd3 -> 80 gb file backups
80 gb hd4 -> 80 gb music backup

By doing it this way, my drives rarely get fragmented, and when they do, it is quick to defragment them because of their partition size.

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