EVE General Discussion

If anything, installing on a non-os partition would increase performance (but not a noticeable amount, unless it is also a separate physical drive)

Probably depends on the format. Where, it doesn't matter, but for instance you'll get faster performance accessing it off a FAT32, overall. With whatever format, you will have increased access if it's on a second physical drive than on your OS drive. It does matter on the physical disc though, where as the inner rings of the platters are faster that the outer edges, but that holds more true for older drives where they have less platters stacked. With today's drives it's hard to place data in any particular faster access spots on the drives as they are so stacked, so placing the OS partition before or after won't do much if anything.

Oh and partitions on the same physical drive does nothing one way or the other, other than make it easier to keep track of your data junk, for you not the OS. Only physical partitions increase performance (separate physical drive) since you are splitting up read/write access, physically. If your OS is reading something for the OS, your drive is tied up until finished or splits the allocation time, yet on a second drive it can read/write independently (as far as hardware is concerned).

College text book. Was a big hoopla years ago when when they started to phase out FAT32 based OS's in favor for NT. The downside is it's less secure, but tends to read/write more contiguously. NTFS tends to often be more fragmented, slowing down access speeds. Less of an issue with faster drives now, often why the NTFS was installed on a workstation rather than your typical consumer grade system.

Equivalent or better? yeah. Physical drive either slaved or on HD2/HD2-slave. Depending how much more performance you want out of it, I wouldn't worry so much about size but rather RPM speeds for a second drive. Also make sure you have plenty of system memory, you don't want to slow down performance overall doing VM swaps. Now if you were going for server performance (luvs srvrs), RAM drive? :D hehe j/k too much trouble for a desktop toy.

Oh yeah, let me clarify. Equivalent if RAID 0. I'm not suggesting a RAID setting though, just independent drives. Since you are just putting the APPs on a second drive, and not trying to speed up your first drive with the OS (not needed), I see no benefit on RAID 0... at least as long as you have plenty of system memory. Now if you are running multiple apps, a database, OS, compiling, video editing, yeah sure RAID 0.

Yah but you are adding the USB to the bus path though. There's an interface for what are typically 3GB/sec SATA on one side of the USB cord and on the other the USB on-board bus.... so you are going through a second bus at (I'm guessing) max USB2.0 speed using what is probably a 5400RPM HDD and the SATA bus which is probably the cheapest one the external drive vendor could find. That's obviously not going to be very fast because there's bad latency in part because of the second bus and in part because most external drives are crappy and have relatively low transfer rates due to low quality harddrive and multiple buses. Eve is faster if you install it on another drive, but I would look into like a stripped RAID array or something because the external drive option is a real non-starter in the speed department. Just my 2 isk...

to clarify, i meant that moving it from a 7200rpm drive to a 5400rpm drive wouldn't be better, but 7200rpm to 7200rpm would be better.

You'll be fine.

Years ago I was worried about transfer speeds causing delays in games I installed on external drives, but I've been doing it with all kinds of games now without any problems. Pretty much any new MMO I might not continue goes on an external, works fine.

Heck, one of my PCs has a partition just for the OS and everything else is a non OS partition, and that works well too. I know a lot of people who choose that route.

Another plus is that installing on a different drive keeps your boot.ini safe.

That right there.

Thanks guys and gals for the discussion.