RAID And You (A Guide To RAID-0/1/5/6/xx)

[KoHaN69]

Amazing OP, now here is my buttload of questions!

You have three options for the location of your Page File. The first is to put it on a different partition on your primary (boot) drive. By locating your Page File in its own partition (according to Microsoft) your page file will not become fragmented. Whether that's true or not, by partitioning your hard drive with a seperate Page File partition you do get to put it at a marginally faster part of your hard drive.

1.) But doesnt a second partition start closer to the middle of the drive?
Meaning that any second partition should be slower than any first, more "outer" partition?


2.) So which of the following would be optimal configuration on one physical drive with 3 partitions C:\ D:\ E:\ (partioned in that order) ?
C:\ for system D:\ for paging E:\ for games? or D:\ for games E:\ for paging?

3.) Small file means seek time > read time?

4.) Is seek/read time on a HD's spec, the average time, or the best (most outward on platter) time?

5.) So partitioning a RAID 0 setup improves the performance?

5b.) In RAID 0, can one partition to be made into RAID while others seen as single drives?
For example:

Drive1 Partition in RAID C: , Stand-alone partition D:
Drive2 Partition in RAID C: , Stand-alone partition E:


6.) If main OS is on RAID 0, should a 2GB page-file be set to another single drive for greater performance?

7.) I have 2x Seagate 320s (ST3320620AS3) I wanna raid 0, but one is 3 AAK, and the other is 3 AAE.
Does anyone know if the firmware difference will make an impact?

8.) Portability!
My post important question is: Can a Raid setup be transplanted into a new motherboard/raid card?
For example, if I make a hardwar raid 0 with my s939 nf4 Ultra-D, and later upgrade to a P35 MSI or whatever, can I take my 2 drives in raid from current, to another raid controller?

PS: WTF happened to Hybrid Drives? a 16gb flashdrive can be gotten for ~$50, why the hell am I not seeing at least 8GB flash +320GB platter drives??!