How should I use my hard drives?

[hoyaguru]

My old hard drive is full, time to upgrade.

Old drive: Western Digital WD1600YD 160GB, 16MB cache, 7200RPM. I have it split up as C: drive 60MB, and D drive 100MB. Generally I install all programs to the D drive in case there is a problem with the operating system, I think I have a better chance of saving important data this way. This drive is about 5 years old, and has been used hard.

New drive: Western Digital WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0 1TB, 32MB cache, 7200RPM. Just bought it today, trying to figure out the best way to use it. I could:

A: Split the new drive in two, probably 200GB C: drive and 800GB D drive, copy the old drive over to the new drive, make the old drive into E: drive, use it for backup.

B: Use the old drive as 160GB C: drive, use the new drive as 1TB D drive.

My question is, if I take go with option B, am I going to have a slower system than if I went with option A? The 1TB drive is going to be faster than the old drive, I think, though I'm not sure if it will be noticeable. They both have 4.2 ms average latency, both spin at 7200rpm, both have a data transfer rate of 3Gbps, the big difference is the 32MB cache on the new drive as opposed to the 16MB cache on the old one.

With option A, I was thinking that once the operating system is loaded, most of what I'll be doing with the computer will be coming off of the new drive, and that should be as quick as I can get. Also, with option B, by splitting the 1TB drive, I might be keeping my programs on the D drive partition a little safer, but if the whole drive goes bad, having it split into two drives isn't going to help me much anyway.

Or, am I thinking too much about all of this, and I won't notice a difference in speed no matter what I do? I'm guessing that's the case, and if so, should I look at my old drive as a liability because it has been used for 5 years, and will be more likely to fail than the new drive?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

 

[pete1229]

One of the things you should keep in mind is the age of that old drive, 5 years and as you say it's been used hard. Although it may not show now, but it's days are numbered so using it as a c drive which I am assuming would be your system drive could lead to some headaches down the road. If you mount the old drive in an external enclosurer, you'll be able to delete any partitions, reformat and use it for storage, the advantage to this is you can power it up only when needed and extend it's life.

 

[hoyaguru]

One of the things you should keep in mind is the age of that old drive, 5 years and as you say it's been used hard. Although it may not show now, but it's days are numbered so using it as a c drive which I am assuming would be your system drive could lead to some headaches down the road. If you mount the old drive in an external enclosurer, you'll be able to delete any partitions, reformat and use it for storage, the advantage to this is you can power it up only when needed and extend it's life.

Yes, that's one thing that's worrying me. I was just thinking though, I'll have enough room on the new drive that I can do a daily backup of the old drive daily, and if (when) it fails, I won't lose everything. But, is it worth it, or should I just split up the new drive and forget the old drive?

I could split the new drive at 160GB C drive and 840GB D drive, then back up the C drive daily to the old 160GB drive too. I'd rather not do the external drive, I've spent enough on this old computer over the past couple of days, new hard drive, new video card, any more and I might as well buy a new computer.

 

[C1]

This last strategy sounds the best. It is typical of what I do, except I run the old drives for backup using an external enclosure.

 

[hoyaguru]

This last strategy sounds the best. It is typical of what I do, except I run the old drives for backup using an external enclosure.

Yes, I think this is what I'll do. I think I can make the C drive larger than the old 160GB drive, as all I'll be backing up is the operating system and a few program files. And, the old drive shouldn't be running all the time, just when I do the daily backup. If I do it this way, I will get the benefit of any speed increase that the new drive has over the old, though I still doubt it will be something I can notice.

 

[mfenn]

Your old drive is a probably two 80GB platters whereas the new drive is two 500GB platters. It should be noticeably faster.

I don't really see the point of playing partitioning games in this day and age though. You don't really gain anything by doing so (at least under Windows). If your Windows install gets screwed up, you'll have to reinstall most of your programs anyway because most programs depend on registry keys which must live on the C drive. Additionally, any malicious program which gets access to your C drive can also just as easily wipe out anything on your D drive as well, so I don't really see benefit there either.

 

[hoyaguru]

Your old drive is a probably two 80GB platters whereas the new drive is two 500GB platters. It should be noticeably faster.

I don't really see the point of playing partitioning games in this day and age though. You don't really gain anything by doing so (at least under Windows). If your Windows install gets screwed up, you'll have to reinstall most of your programs anyway because most programs depend on registry keys which must live on the C drive. Additionally, any malicious program which gets access to your C drive can also just as easily wipe out anything on your D drive as well, so I don't really see benefit there either.

Thanks for your input. You may be right, though I've never had a virus or spyware on my D drive, it's always on my C drive. I have always felt safer splitting the drive, and now I pretty much have to split the new drive so when I copy everything over from the old drive, I won't have to go through my registry for hours changing every instance of D\program files to C\program files.

I didn't know that these drives were two platters, I always pictured them as a single platter. Do you think it would be beneficial to split it into two 500GB partitions? Though I doubt I'd be able to split it exactly (physically), I'll probably end up with each 500GB partition using about half of each platter. I wonder if there's a program out there that would let me do this.

 

[mfenn]

I didn't know that these drives were two platters, I always pictured them as a single platter. Do you think it would be beneficial to split it into two 500GB partitions? Though I doubt I'd be able to split it exactly (physically), I'll probably end up with each 500GB partition using about half of each platter. I wonder if there's a program out there that would let me do this.

I believe the LBAs are interleaved between the platters, so no you wouldn't really be able to split it that way.

 

[Zap]

I'd say just use the new drive as one C: partition. Keep it simple. You can either sell off the old drive, give it to someone that needs it or maybe get an external enclosure for it and keep it for backups.