I have 2 HD's. Can anybody please tell me the best way to make use of what i got in my system?

Marktoloba

Senior member
Jan 9, 2005
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Up until now i have just had everything installed on my 640gb. Both drives are new but i am new to having 2 hard drives i always just had one. I am big into gaming and movie making so I am trying to figure out the best setup.

Right now i just setup the 160gb raptor as a secondary drive but wouldn't it be wise to have the os on the raptor and just save my movies/music and stuff to the 640gb?

I am not sure how to do this, i already have my os setup on the 640gb drive and wouldnt know how to swap it over to the 160gb drive. i appreciate advice you guys can give to help me have a faster and more smooth setup.

My 2 hard drives are

WD6401AALS 640gb 7200rpm
and
WD1600HLFS 160gb 10k rpm
 

Marktoloba

Senior member
Jan 9, 2005
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after looking into it, somebody recommended ghosting the operating system onto the new hard drive. Not sure how to do that or if anybody has experience with this. Still any advice anybody has would be great.
 

Absolution75

Senior member
Dec 3, 2007
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Its a tough call. Just split the HD's the way you would spend your time.

Probably put the movie making stuff on the WD640 because I'm assuming it will be long writes/reads of large files. The OS could probably go on the raptor for quick boot (and the fact the higher spindle speed will perform better with lots of small files). Games are a tossup because the raptor could have quicker load times, but you could saturate your drive pretty quick, probably put it on the larger drive (you'll never be playing games and writing movies at the same time . . . I hope). The pagefile then becomes a problem though, you generally want it on a separate drive from the OS, but since you will be doing movies, I can imagine those problems will use the page file quite often.

I'd just try to balance everything so no matter what, both hard drives are working - if that?s possible.
 

elconejito

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Dec 19, 2007
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www.harvsworld.com
Use the raptor as your OS/apps/games drive, and the 640GB as storage. The raptor is quicker (random access) so it will feel snappier than the 640GB. sustained writes though are probably close and the 640GB might actually win there so videos will be just fine on them.

If possible in your video software (what are you using?) setup the scratch drive as the raptor. That way opening and saving files will be on the 640GB, and any scratch operations will be on the raptor. You want to limit the number of processes accessing the same drive at the same time as much as you can.

To move the OS, use imaging software to clone the drive from 640 -> raptor. Ghost should do it, I like Acronis True Image. There are free options as well, but they might not be as intuitive to use. To avoid confusion, after cloning take out the 640 and boot into windows. Make sure all your data is there and everything is working fine. Once you're confident the drive cloned properly (run scans disk checks etc) then attach the 640 again, by USB or eSATA if possible*** and format it. Then install normally inside the case.

*** If you have both drives, exact copies of each other, in the computer at the same time *sometimes* windows gets confused as to which drive to boot from. So if at all possible attach the 640 after windows has booted to format it.