Memory Guide III- YOUR THOUGHTS

[TechJumper]

Just Curious about the following -

I have a 10 gig hard drive, seems to me like a ton of space. But after I installed Visual Studio a n d AutoCad, my hard drive seems to be losing its grip. I am currently using 3 of the 10 gigs, when should I upgrade? When I have only 5 gigs, or less? I welcome your thoughts.

[NDC]

In my opinion, it would be best for you to keep at least 1/4th of the HDD free for virtual memory. Since you have 10GB HDD, I would say that it would be time for an HDD upgrade when you have about 2.5GB left of free space. As for now, HDD upgrade would be unnecessary in regards to capacity issues.

But since you are using CAD, It would be nice to consider buying a FAST HDD, perhaps a 7,200 RPM drive.

[This message has been edited by NDC (edited 10-24-2000).]

[Mntsnow]

I too would tend to lean towards what NDC has suggested. (7200rpm drive) I personally like to keep atleast 20% of my drives free. It makes the defraging easier and faster too.

[mudoggy]

Couple the above replies with the fact that HDD's are cheap at many places right now (7200 rpm 15 G drive for around $90..), and there you go! http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[Gene C.]

I think the ten would be ok for a primary drive. divide it into 2 partitions for easy maintenance purpose's
but, I would get a second one for all my file storage and backups ect. as you know autocad can eat up some mb's ect.

[NDC]

Oh, forgot to mention.........

If you have a fixed size for your Virtual Memory file, you don't have to worry about leaving 1/4th the disk space for virtual Memory, because the Virtual Memory will already have its reserved disk space for the VM file. But like MntSnow has said above, having at least 20% free space will make life easier when it comes to defrag-time. Having the disk jam-packed will slow down defragging time, because it won't have enough free space to temporarily move the fragged files to another part of the disk
during the defragmentation process.

Personally, I like to keep a fixed size for the Virtual Memory file on all my Windows OS's because the OS does lose some performance since Windows will need to resize the VM file. I have a fixed 1GB VM file on a 1GB partiton on my IDE 7,200RPM drive and a fixed 1GB VM file on 1GB partition on my SCSI 10,000rpm HDD. Both of the VM files on the two HDD's have a dedicated partition for the VM files. That way, I don't have to worry about the VM files getting fragged up or losing performance to find the reserved VM files among the saved data or system files.

I don't think you'll need to make your VM file partitions as big as I have them. The reason I have mine so big is that I run low on memory even with 768MB physical memory because I need to work with huge graphic files.



[This message has been edited by NDC (edited 10-24-2000).]