How to organize hard disk to maximize Lightroom ?

[holla]

I have a 80 go HD 7200 tr IDE with Windows XP SP3 and all software including lightroom 2. I just buy a new HD Samsung F1 1 To sata II 32mo.
I have approximativly 300 go of personnal photo and 300 of music, programs, movies.
I want to use lightroom 2 to organise my pictures.
I want to save my pictures monthly on external HD

How best to organise ?

1/ keep slower 80 go with OS and lightroom and put the way to pictures on the new HD partitionned on 2 parts of 500 go (one for just photo and the other for others things who can include sometimes virus... in order in case of crash to have more chance to save my pictures and to avoid BIG time of antivirus scanning ) ?

2/ Take only the 1 To and put OS on it and pictures... with partition or not and if yes how ?

THX A LOT IN ADVANCE
PS : Athlon XP2000, 1 go ram, Abit NF7-s

 

[vladiator]

I have a 80 go HD 7200 tr IDE with Windows XP SP3 and all software including lightroom 2. I just buy a new HD Samsung F1 1 To sata II 32mo.
I have approximativly 300 go of personnal photo and 300 of music, programs, movies.
I want to use lightroom 2 to organise my pictures.
I want to save my pictures monthly on external HD

How best to organize ?

1/ keep slower 80 go with OS and lightroom and put the way to pictures on the new HD partitionned on 2 parts of 500 go (one for just photo and the other for others things who can include sometimes virus... in order in case of crash to have more chance to save my pictures and to avoid BIG time of antivirus scanning ) ?

2/ Take only the 1 To and put OS on it and pictures... with partition or not and if yes how ?

THX A LOT IN ADVANCE
PS : Athlon XP2000, 1 go ram, Abit NF7-s

I like your first idea. I would keep all my OS and software on the 80 Go hard drive. This should be plenty. Keep Lightroom installed on this partition but set it up so that the Lightroom database is on the other, larger hard drive. I would make 600Gb for my pictures and 400Gb for your music. I would set up Lightroom to have its database on the 600Gb partition where your pictures would be. Create a separate folder and call it LightroomDB or something like that...it's good to have the Lightroom database in a known place so that you can back it up regularily.

This way you can set up backing up easily and backup both your pictures and your Lightroom database. I use SyncBackSE for my backup.

Hope this helps.