hard drive advise

[Race]

I have a machine with a 20 gig HD that's about half full....Fat32, no partisions. I'm adding a 40 gig HD to the system. I'm thinking of installing future games, video, etc. on the new 40 gig drive. I'm looking for advise and/or ideas on what would be the best way to go on utilizing this second hd........just leave it as one partision??......partision?...etc. Will files be spread over both drives when I install programs on the second HD??......or does this matter.....and can I pick my own drive letter in XP? Also, is access to the second drive as fast as the main drive? (for games).
Any ideas/thoughts would be very much appreciated!

Thanks....


P4 2.0 ghz
384 mgs PC800 RDRAM
G-Force 4 Ti4200 VIVO 128 mgs
20 gig Ultra ATA100 7200
adding 40 gig Ultra ATA100 7200

 

[Snickle]

WinXP cannot create a FAT32 partition over 32GB but can work with bigger ones just fine, use a Win98SE boot floppy for fdisk.

Many programs can be completely installed on other drives except for files they put in the Windows folder/subfolders. MS Office is different, can put part on another partition but still 1/3 to 2/3 on the same drive as the OS [common and/or shared files].

One partition will be easier to manage. The BIOS normally assigns drive letters to physical drives first starting with C: and the CD/Zip drives last. I prefer WinXP do it the same way so moved the CD to G: and Zip to H:, kept hard drives at C: and D: and can assign E: and F: later if I repartition the drives.

Access speed shouldn't be an issue if the drives are close to identical except for size. I have a WDC30GB and WDC20GB and don't notice any difference.

 

[Wirdo]

If you have Xp why not use Ntfs? It will allow you to make your 40Gb one drive and will save you lots of space since the cluster size will be 4kb instead of 32kb. You can also convert your 20Gb to Ntfs and free up some disk space. Ntfs is the best choice for any Hd over 8Gb IMO. Unless you have an OS that dont support it or dual boot.