Hard Drive config question

Reading Coolmandingo's RAM question I began to wonder if there might be good reasons to pay attention to way I have my hard drive(s) set up and configured.

I've always preferred one HD and one partition at home, mostly for simplicity and ease of use. I spend enough time fixing PCs at work, I mostly want the one I have at home to be reliable.

Still HD reads and writes are physical operations and so are many many times slower than any RAM operation.

I like SATA and I plan to migrate there sooner than I would normally adopt other new technologies.

Outside of that I was wondering if anyone out there has spent much time tweaking their home PC for improved HD performance. If so, what drive/array setup(s) do you use and what kind of performance increases have you noticed?

I always have a 2nd partition for data, I move documents, temp files, email to the 2nd partition - makes it easier to reload.

Thats a good organizational strategy NooNoo, however I don't think it would give any performance benefit. I'm looking for reasons or ways to increase performance for a home gaming PC.

-Is a RAID array at home worth the effort and $$$?
-Are multiple drives, one for the OS, one for the swap file, one for data, one for apps the way to go?
-Maybe I should have the OS on the primary drive and have secondary mirrored drives for the swap file and apps and another single drive for data.
-Maybe a primary OS drive plus a secondary swap file drive plus a RAID array for all the rest. There's lots of possibilities.

I'm wondering if someone has any solid information or experience with optimizing home PC hard drives.

I'm thinking if I wanted to spend the $$$ I would:
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Primary master: small (10-20Gb), high speed, for OS and standard apps (office, web browser, etc...)

Primary slave: small (10-20Gb), high speed, for swap file, mirrored with Secondary slave

Secondary master: CDRW/DVD-RW

Seconday slave: small (10-20Gb), high speed, for swap file, mirrored with Primary slave

SCSI RAID controller with a three drive RAID 5 array for data and game installs.

PLUS!!! A PCI IDE controller for a standard CD/DVD drive and a ZIP drive.
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OK that just looks as excessive as he!!

You begin to see why I stick with one drive, when I think of how I would like to optimize drives I quickly go overboard and think "well its just not worth all that time and money".

So I'm wondering if anyone uses a simpler, more elegant solution that still produces a good performance boost.

Hi Pinnacle,
IMHO You thought of a gr8 Device settings.
But I think you can easily do better (and more cheap).
For system - use a SCSI HDD (on dedicated controller) 18Gb simple Scsi drive will be more than enough.
For Data Use a Proomises http://www.promise.com/product/produ...108&familyId=2 card with Dual HDD (Either Striped or mirror for your choice). I recommend on Using Raptor Sata WD drives http://www.wdc.com/en/products/WD360GD.asp
For temps (and Swaps) on a IDE put an HDD dedicated for that Purpose.

Also Consider more RAM (always a good Idea ;) )

Cheers,
Gabriel