Hey, I've just had a hard drive go bad in a Windows XP Pro computer that is about 2 days shy of it's 3rd birthday. Old hard drive was an 80 GB Maxtor SATA150 as a single NTFS partition.

I'm going to be reinstalling XP Pro from scratch on 2 new hard drives and my question is how is it best to configure things. I mean in the sense of what File System to use, how to partition the drives, what to put where, etc. I am planning on using the faster drive as the boot/OS drive and obviously larger chunks of data like digital pictures, mp3 files, digital video will have to live on the slower 320 GB drive. But other than that very high level view I'm not sure what's best to put where.

The new drives are:
WD Raptor 10K RPM 36 GB 16 MB cache SATA WD360ADFD
WD 7200 RPM 320 GB 16 MB cache SATA2 WD3200YS
I also have an external USB 250 GB hard drive purchased for backups

For now I have some freebie backup software that came with the external drive, also a copy of Ghost 10.0 that I plan to use for backup of the OS if not data as well.

I wish I could give some idea of what the computer is used for, but it's the current high end system in the house, so it gets used for email, web browsing, programming, gaming, you name it.

Other system components:
Asus P4P800 SE (SATA 150) motherboard
P4 2.8 GHz
1 GB RAM
GeForce 4800 SE

Thanks for any advice.

-Tuco

I kinda of have the same setup.

my OS is the raptor 10,000RPM but its a 70GB drive.

then I have 5 other HDDs.

ya put the OS on the raptor, all HDDs use NTFS,clone the OS drive so if anything happens you can go right back.

as for your files backup the important ones on a fourth drive

I have a 7th external sata that I back up my raptor to, my other files that are important are saved on other external drives.