Drive organization for best repair/unrar speed

[Zodler]

I have a C: drive which has windows and my programs and I have a D: drive which has my data including Steam/games + AltBinz downloads.

I have noticed that my playing gets choppy when AltBinz repairs or unrars. I thought maybe it would be thread priority but it’s not and I have come to the conclusion that it’s the drive read/write which altbinz(unrar/repair) and games do at the same time.

Now my question is, what is the best drive combination for setting the
TF) Temporary Folder
DF) Default Download Folder
UF) Unrar to a Different Folder

By drive I mean a real separate hard drive and not just a partition.
I can come up with these scenarios

Drive D: Games
Drive E: TF + DF + UF
--------------
Drive D: Games + TF + DF
Drive E: UF
-------------
Drive D: Games
Drive E: TF + DF
Drive F: UF

What is the best solution? I prefer to use less drives of course and think that a 3 drive solution might be too extreme but I definitely need a 2 drive solution but which one?

[Ascathon]

Did you set AltBinz to pause while extracting/unraring? If so, there is no TF, DF or UF at the same time.

[davidq666]

i'd suggest:

Drive D: Games
Drive E: DF
Drive F: UF

TF in Ram via Article cache ther is if enough left. If that still gives u choppy play try pausing downloads during unrar/repair

[Zodler]

Thank you for your replies. I didn't know/notice that you could pause downloads during unrar. First, my download is not that fast, it's 1000 KB/s. Do you think that can cause anything? Even if I pause I don't think it will help. Just unraring in the same drive is not a good thing for large files I think. When you unrar on the same drive, you are reading and writing at the same space heavily.

I will tell you exactly my situation. As I said it's during playing games, and especially Call of Duty MW2/Blackops multiplayer. At the start of the level, where you see a progress bar on the map and doing unrar at the same time, it gets real slow and I miss the game. I think at that point, the game is writing or decompressing the map into the drive and that slows maybe?

The 3 drive solution is really too much for me. i want to go with 2 but which one?

I kind of think about
Drive D: Games + TF + DF
Drive E: UF

instead of this
Drive D: Games
Drive E: TF + DF + UF

because the unraring will be done on another drive and it should help alot.

[zoned]

TF + DF on same drive temp pieces get built to their parts a simple move or copy operation on same drive (is it a move or copy ?). If copy then yes use another physical drive if no same drive would be better. Actualy would like to have a setting for move or copy. Since move doesn't totaly erase the file and if don't delete to the bin, i never do. The file will remain on drive until a hdd low level format. Considering the type of files some may get move file is a bad option to use.  i agree to use another physical drive for the UF, better if altbinz has option also to pause while doing helps for no hdd slap


Addition it helps if the drives are defragmented every so often, not ideal sollution if there are huge gb files on them. If cannot move them to another drive, and not needing defrag, have the defrag ignore them.

[davidq666]

consider using article caching, that eliminates a lot of unnecessary writing to a physical drive. if u can spare 200-300 MB ram it's definatly the best option

[Zodler]

Where is article caching?

[Ascathon]

Setup -> Download #2 :|