Separate System and Data disks - performance gain?

[deko]

Does anyone have any test data that shows how much performance gain is
realized by using separate system and data disks?

The idea is that since the OS and user data are on separate spindles, there
is no contention when the computer needs to read OS-related data and user
data at the same time. I've been told this can improve overall systems
performance by up to 10%, but I think that's exaggerated.

As far as I know, the My Documents folder can be aliased to anything you
want, so I'm thinking about aliasing it to a second internal drive, along
with my Outlook PST data files. But I'm not sure what the trade-offs are:
Do I get better performance? Or does it just make for more complex
administration? Other concerns?

Thanks in advance.

 

[DL]

You are unlikely to notice any performance diff. - good or bad
The main advantage is that it makes for simpler backup regime, you are also
able to hose your o/s and reformat/install without any impact on data.
You can also do this by partitioning a hd.

 

[D.Currie]

Does anyone have any test data that shows how much performance gain is
realized by using separate system and data disks?

The idea is that since the OS and user data are on separate spindles,
there is no contention when the computer needs to read OS-related data and
user data at the same time. I've been told this can improve overall
systems performance by up to 10%, but I think that's exaggerated.

As far as I know, the My Documents folder can be aliased to anything you
want, so I'm thinking about aliasing it to a second internal drive, along
with my Outlook PST data files. But I'm not sure what the trade-offs are:
Do I get better performance? Or does it just make for more complex
administration? Other concerns?

Thanks in advance.

The only way you're going to see any performance gain is if that's the
system bottleneck. To be honest, you're probably going to gain more
productivity by implementing some file and folder naming system that makes
sense, so users won't spent time trying to remember the names of files they
need, rather than worrying about milliseconds of access time once they've
found the file they need.

Keeping the computer clean of bugs and extra programs is also going to help
performance.

Having data on a separate drive (or network drive on a separate computer) is
a good idea for other reasons, like backups, though.