HDD query

[snakenobi]

I am buying a 3tb HDD

people around the net have an opinion to buy 1 but 2 HDD with 1-2tb of space



I want to know why is that?

1)Are they talking about RAID and data being split and written on 2 drives?

2)Does SATA transfer from two drives increase speed perfromance?i think SATA 3.0 should take care of it from one HDD alone

3)Whats the File transfer time from one HDD to another compared to file transfer between one HDD itself?

4)Any other reasons?

 

[Charlie98]

I think the reliability of the multi-platter big-GB HDD's are a bit hit-and-miss...

 

[greenhawk]

1) raid can be one of the reasons, but buying to allows better performance in some situations as you can spread the programs across them so the computer is more responcive. Generally now days the 2 drive approach is for the first to be a small fast drive (like a SSD) and the second being a large quiet and cheap drive (space/storage).

2) In raid 0, the speeds can be double that of a single drive. Sata 3 does not help a single drive be as fast as the connection speed is not the limiting factor effecting the speed of a drive. It is the drive itself and the standard drives are only recently getting over 100MB/s sustained transfer reading.

3) if copying the file, from one drive to another different drive (ie: not a partition) is faster. If moving files, then a single drive back to itself is faster (a lot, but then the data is not read/writen, it just has it's location changed in the file allocation table).

4) price.

 

[bryanW1995]

It's reliability. Price is almost always cheaper per GB on a 3tb hdd than it would be on 1x1tb + 1x2tb hdd or 2x1.5tb hdd. And fwiw, I have a 2tb wd green drive that has had spotty reviews but been perfect for me, and my wife has a 3tb free agent go-flex that has also been perfect.