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2 Hard Drives better than 1 big one?

B

big4x4

Golden Member
I have a Seagate 200 gig hard drive that is still in box. I was wondering if I should take it back and get 2 drives instead of one. Would it be faster? Say I would put all my music and storage on one hard drive and my games and OS on the other. Would I benefit from having 2 (I dont have raid if that matters and only PATA drives). Or, would I be better off keeping the 200 gig seagate? Thank you
 
Yes it would be faster if you got a Raptor for the OS and games, then the seagate for storage. Seagate is a awesome company backed by i three year warrenty. I would keep the drive.
 
Since you can't get a SATA-only Raptor (not that the drives provide too much worthwhile performance increase anyway), 2 drives may be of more limited benefit. I'd imagine they'd help if you do things with lots of hard drive access, though, like music production or video editing, and maybe they would speed up Windows a bit too.
 
MY seagate has a 5 year warranty. Since I cannot use sata, I would need to use PATA drives. So, 2 drives would not offer any benefits over one? I would put all my music and data on 1 drive and then my OS and games on the primary drive. Raptors are out of the picture 😉

So, I should just keep the Seagate?
 
They call them partitions 😉

Keep your big drive, & make a little partition for Windows, & leave the rest for storage 🙂
 
if 1 drive fails then you loose all,two drives would provide more security against drive failer,OS,Programs,data,music on drive C:,games on drive D: and keep a updated copy of documents,data music stored on drive D: and you should be ok :thumbsup:
 
If that one big drive goes out, your going lose a lot of data all at once. I put windows and progs in one hdd and put all my music and important stuff into my other drive.
 
The first question: do you need 200gb hard drive? If you dont, chances are you'll be happier with a versatility that 2 80gb 8mb cache hard drives offer as you'll be able to reformat the OS at any time independently of having secure data on the 2nd hard drive. Also see if you can find some deals that have Mail-In-Rebates on hard drives. That way you might be able to pick up 2 120gb hard drives on the cheap.

How about this:

Seagate ST3160023A-RK 160GB Retail Box Ultra DMA100, 8MB Buffer, 7200RPM - $49.99 AFTER Mail in Rebate
(rebate expires on 2004-12-09)

I am sure if you go into HotDeals on these forums, you'll find other deals.
 
Good points. But......I like Seagate's 5 year warranty. Also, woudlnt' 2 drives cause more heat and more noise? Where can I find 80 gig drives for 80 dollars (that is what I got the seagate for) ?
 
I like having two drives as I can back stuff up without burning it and also modify the backup if the original changes, for example my music collection is mirrored on my second drive. I still use my burner for some things of course, like backing up my DVDs.
 
So,

Would it be worth it to trade my Seagate 200 gig drive for 2 wester digital 80 gig drives? (no cash involved)
 
Why 2 80gb, that's only 160gb, 40gb less? I'd stick with that unless you have 120gb x 2 making up with 40gb more. But I'd prefer 250gb or 320gb, one drive = slower but runs cooler plus use less power.
The money you save in electricity will more then make up for it.
 
Yes, a two drive setup would be capable of higher performance (be sure to hook them to separate IDE channels) and provide more security than having all eggs in one basket. I have seen 160 Gig drives for about $50. AR in the recent past...
. I have always used multiple drives as I run SCSI and until recently 74 Gig was considered a "large" SCSI drive. Nice to be able to hook up to 15 drives on the one controller.
.bh.
 
I see no one took statistics or LP here... Adding a second drive does not decrease the chance of a failure. Each of the drives has their same chance of failure. Nothing changed except that now you have two drives that could fail. So, actually, by adding a drive, you have INCREASED the chance of a disk failure. (now the argument that each drive will be less taxed, so less chance - Read/Writes for a desktop are usually not enough to impact what the MTBF would be - server drives, maybe).

The one dirve is fine. And do not partition it. That is a hold over from when the file system and drives were really unreliable and PC guys were constantly fiddling with the drive space because it was always full. Man, I think I blew DOS up twice tuning Stacker. NTFS with NT 3.1 was not very safe for work either. 😉
 
I think you should keep the 200GB and try to get hold of a used 40-80GB for your OS. you can never have too much storage and 2 drives are better than 1
 
I don't really care about losing my data all that much, since if it is really THAT important, I will just back it up on a cd or dvd. My question is......If I hook up 2 hard drives on the same IDE channel, there would be no performance difference? I just don't want my OS to slow down as I pile more stuff on my single drive.

 
Originally posted by: big4x4
I don't really care about losing my data all that much, since if it is really THAT important, I will just back it up on a cd or dvd. My question is......If I hook up 2 hard drives on the same IDE channel, there would be no performance difference? I just don't want my OS to slow down as I pile more stuff on my single drive.
Click to expand...

If you are only accessing one drive at a time, there should be no performance difference. If you are trying to use both drives simultaneously (especially if you are copying from one to the other), it will run noticeably slower, since it can only read or write from one drive on each channel at a time.
 
Perhaps you don't get a lower risk of failure by adding a drive, but you do limit the risk of data loss. And if you do run only one drive, partitioning IS a good idea as you can isolate MOST disk writes away from the OS partition. IMO, the only valid reason not to partition is if you have drive-sized files to manipulate. I not only run multiple drives, but each one has at least two logical drives on it - the main one has C - J!
.bh.

:moon:
 
Originally posted by: Matthias99
Originally posted by: big4x4
I don't really care about losing my data all that much, since if it is really THAT important, I will just back it up on a cd or dvd. My question is......If I hook up 2 hard drives on the same IDE channel, there would be no performance difference? I just don't want my OS to slow down as I pile more stuff on my single drive.
Click to expand...

If you are only accessing one drive at a time, there should be no performance difference. If you are trying to use both drives simultaneously (especially if you are copying from one to the other), it will run noticeably slower, since it can only read or write from one drive on each channel at a time.
Click to expand...

Can you give me an example of using drives at the same time? See, I was under the impression that the more crud you store on your hard drive, the more it slows down over time. That is why I considered doing 2 hard drives ( 1 xp and programs 2- data and files. Also, since I am running on the same ide cable, I probably wouldn't see any performance benefits...right? Ah well, I think you have convinced me to just keep my seagate and save 1) power 2) heat 3) MONEY!!!! 🙂 (unless someone can convince me otherwise)
 
If you only have one hard drive, and it dies, you will lose everything.

If you have two, you can store an image of the operating system on the second drive. You can put the pgefile on the second drive. You can put backups of your data on the second drive.
Then, if one of the two drives dies, you can still salvage a lot of your data.

Statistically speaking, chances of two hard drives in a system both failing at the same time are extremely low. Much less than the chances of one hard drive failing.
If you are into investing, you may have heard advisors saying you have to diversify your investments and not put all your savings into one stock or Mutual fund. This is just like that.

Noise in a computer is usually determined by the noisiest component in the box. So, if your CPU fan is the noisiest thing and you add a hard drive, unless, the hard drive is louder than the CPU fan, the overall noise of the system is not going to change.

Most motherboards allow you to connect each HD to a dedicated channel. Then, you have two data channels and two heads (each HD has a head). That is faster when you copy data from one HD to the other.
If you only have one HD and copy data from one folder to another, the read and write functions will have to compete for the head since one drive has only one head.

http://support.microsoft.com/d...x?scid=kb;en-us;314482
 
its best i think to have one main high perfomance os drive. and a raid of storage drives

For my work settup, I have a Cheetah 18gb 15k SCSI drive as my OS drive. 2 sata raid of 1terabyte 7200 ide hd mirroing each other. Eventually I want to move to a hotswap scsi raid settup but tahts probly over kill for most ppl.

ZEPPER: damn, if i did it like you, I would have almost 20 drive letters to worry about.
 
Thank you for the input. My motherboard only has 2 ide ports - I use one IDE cable for my CDRW and DVD rw. The other one I have my hard drive on. I do not want to put on HD and one CD rom on each ide cable just because it will screw up my cable management and such. I guess I should just keep this Seagate as it has a 5 yr warranty, and if I ever need another drive for just my OS, I will probably buy one. Or, trade someone on this forum for 2 80 gig wd drives w/ 8mb cache .........
 
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