Hard Drive Efficiency Tips?

[DLBME]

I have two hard drives in my computer and am trying to figure out the most efficient way to use them. I know that it is better to put Windows and its swap file on seperate drives. So, if Windows is on one drive and the swap file is on the other drive then which drive do I want to install games and programs onto? Do I install them on the Windows drive so that the game/program and the swap file are on seperate drives or do I install the game/program onto the swap file drive so that windows and the game/program are on seperate drives? Any other ways to maximise performance? Other than RAID, I need the space.

I am running Vista Ultimate 64 and XP Pro X64. Both drives are NTFS with 4096 byte sectors. I notice on Vista 64 I can choose anywhere from 512 to 64K sized allocation units. I have always used 4096 for the extra speed instead of the 512 default but maby nowadays 8192 or even higher would be better and still not waste too much space?

[Disk_Contented]

The swapfile on another drive will only benefit when the drive is on a different channel to the OS.

I would put each OS on it's own drive. This way, you won't lose all access should the drive with the OS's on it go down or have a problem. You will allways have a bootable system.

I use 3, sometimes 4 partitions per drive. depends what I'm using them for.
One partition is allways FAT32 and contains diagnostic material as well as a copy of a drive image. Much faster than optical to restore.
FAT means DOS will see it, that's all.

Small sector size saves space when many small files exist. Larger size will be better when you need optimal speed. Streaming video or audio data to the drive for example.
Not sure if certain apps will have problems with large sector sizes.