Do multiple drives increase performance?

[Wandere]

Buying quiet 7200 RPM IDE drive(s) soon and was thinking....

If I purchased 2 20 gig drives instead of one, would overall system performance increase because the data is staying closer to the center of the platters (assuming it is split between the two rather than filling up one entire one)?

I typically have OS/Apps/Games/Pics partitions on a single drive. If I could split 'em so that the OS and Apps is on one drive and the Games/Pics partitions reside on the other drive...I may get better seek times.

Now, if I decide on getting an additional controller card, I could put the CD/CDRW/HDD's on their own channels (no slaves is a good thing, right?).

Now, if'n I decide on multiple HDD's, the statistical probability of having a failure is doubled methinks...(long time since stats class). That would be a definite down-side.

Just throwing some ideas around with my morning java. 🙂

-Wandere

 

[VBboy]

www.StorageReview.com - compare a 20-GB to a 40-GB drive in their drives database.
Usually, a larger drive will be faster than a smaller one if all else is equal.

 

[LethalWolfe]

To get any speed increase by having 2 or more drives you need to have them running in RAID 0

Lethal

 

[KevinMU1]

One thing that you could do that would be even cooler would be to get a RAID card and do RAID 0, it wouldn't really be much worse than just having your 2 drives in terms of risk of failure (and I too am ashamed to admit that I do not remember my reliability stuff like I should!), and it would be a lot fast because of striping. That's what I want to do on my next box. 🙂

You can always partition, too, at least that way your FATs stay cleaner.