Hard Drive setup recommendations

[Midcoastsurf]

Hello,

I am new to the board and to Mame, but have been in the pinball/arcade hobby for about 16 years.  I am building a bartop mame machine and am looking for suggestions about the best way to set up my hard drives.  I have 1 80gb and 1 250gb hard drive.  I will be running Windows XP.  Both hard drives are wiped clean.  Looking for advice around partitioning, amount needed for Win XP, etc.  My initial thought is to partition the 80 gb into two portions, one 20gb and one 60gb with Win Xp on the 20gb, then put the consoles games on the remaining 60gb (Only really want Atari, Nes, SNES, N64, Genesis).  Then put Mame on the 250 gb (obviously not much room for CHD files.)

I realize that buying a larger Hard drive would be the best solution...but that is not an option right now.

Thanks for the help,
Brad

[Acids]

why bother partitioning??? 

[edekoning]

Why use two HDD's? Do you really need those extra 80GB immediately? You can always swap a HDD out for a bigger one at a later time. Furthermore, as far as I have heard, only a tiny fraction of chd's really work. So first decide on the amount of GBs you really need now.

Personally I would just go with one HDD and a single partition that contains everything. Partitions are nice if you ever need to install a new OS, or reinstall the existing one. But on cabinet its not very likely that you will ever need to touch that OS install after its initial configuration.