I don't think that splitting them will make it faster (it might actually worsen the seek times), but its a nice idea, mainly because you can reinstall the OS without caring about your personal data...

If you had two hdds, doing that will surely increase system performance while playing games or using hdd intensive apps.

Cheers,
Gzaloprgm

In your case, since XP is pretty outdated now, you probably have a pretty good idea of exactly how much space you need for XP and all the programs you intend to run from it. If that assumption is correct I would create 3 partitions.

Whichever OS you work in more should be the first partition -- this will be created on the outer rings of the hard disk, which generates higher sequential reads, resulting in a small performance boost.

Consider how many files you have that are sharable between OSs easily -- You probably can't install games or applications to a common space and access them reliably from both OSs -- firstly because of all the registry settings that get set during installation, but secondly because a game may (potentially) install a different set of files depending on what OS is detected during installation. Generally you're talking documents and media. Figure out how much space you need for those types of files.

Create a partition for WinXP that's as large as you expect to need, then give yourself an extra 20-50 percent to be safe. If you use XP most frequently, make this the first partition, otherwise make it the second.

Create a partition for Win 7 that's as large as the drive can take, less the amount of space you figure you'll need for files you want to share easily between both operating systems (again, applying the 20-50 percent rule for the common files partition, just to be safe.) If you use Win 7 most often, make this partition first, otherwise second. With 1TB, I presume this partition will be significantly larger than the WinXP partition.

Partition the remainder of the drive for common documents


Finally, given that 1TB is pretty large, you might consider having 4 partitions -- 1 for each OS, one for common files, and the 4th for backups or just as an organizational tool.


I'm in the same boat right now myself, but with Windows 7 ultimate and Ubuntu 10.10 -- I've got a 500GB (465.6 actual GBs) boot drive, a 500GB Backup drive (regular backups go here, plus stuff that's backed up once but not on a schedule, like my FLAC and MP3 rips), and a pair of 160GB drives in RAID1 (mirroring).

I partitioned my boot drive with partition 1 being a 200GB Win 7 partition, followed by a 60GB Linux partition, then a 200GB "Storage" partition for common files, and the rest as a swap partition (at least until I figure out something interesting to do with 5.6 GBs).

Quote:Original post by menyo
Did some research and i most probably won't need more then 10GB for win XP, so i make that partition 15GB and put all/most games/programs i need for it onto another partition.

1 TB is plenty of disk, so make it 50-100GB. You can't grow partitions, and XP with all it's service packs and programs that can't be moved to another drive, can easily balloon past 20 GB.

Quote:Don't really know about win7, 100GB is Probably plenty so i go with that. The rest goes for games and apps.

Again, give it plenty - probably around 250GB. Hard drives are cheap, and 100GB disappears like *that*. Apart from a few programs (like Steam) which natively support installation on an alternate drive, it takes a lot of mucking around to get most program installed anywhere except for the C: drive.

i don't use partitions at all since vista. then again, my backup solution is there just in case i would need it one day, and most of my long-term-data is on the network storage (winhomeserver) so i can access it from all computers.

and i wouldn't use xp anymore. are you sure you still need it? maybe you can get your xp stuff actually running in win7 (i got everything running so far, sometimes by changing the app folders rights to full-everyone, or compatibility mode, or getting some old dll put into the app folder) or if there's no compatible version (there are some companies that ported older apps like outcast to make them compatible on new systems), etc..

Quote:Original post by davepermen
and i wouldn't use xp anymore. are you sure you still need it? maybe you can get your xp stuff actually running in win7 (i got everything running so far, sometimes by changing the app folders rights to full-everyone, or compatibility mode, or getting some old dll put into the app folder) or if there's no compatible version (there are some companies that ported older apps like outcast to make them compatible on new systems), etc..

I would echo this. And further, if you absolutely do need XP for a few legacy applications, they ought to run just fine in a virtual machine, which eliminates all this need for partitions, as well as eliminating the need to interrupt your work and reboot...

question is, do you REALLY need them in xp, or do you just stop thinking after the first problem, and switch to xp? i prefer to find out what's wrong and get it running, than running back to the old and on newer hw badly supported os.

use of a virtual machine as another solution would be great for other reasons: imagine getting a new pc. just copy over the virtualmachine file, open it, and play your games again. no re-setup needed.

other than games, there should be ZERO apps that need xp. i got some win3.1 based apps running on win7 at work, it was no big problem (just give write access to the app folder fixes 99% of the issues one can have). if i can get >15 year old apps running on win7 without big problems, so should you.