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Too many HDDs slows up system

donnthom

donnthom

Junior Member
I have 4 HDDs which are partitioned resulting in 12 HDDs. They are not all used and I really don't need that much storage. My Primary disk is SSD. Am I slowing up my computer by having so many hard drives???
 
12 HDDs? Mother of god....
As for slowdowns... well, just imagine how many times those heads have to move on the platters....
 
What are they used for? If the ssd is one of the 4 drives, then the other three are divided into 4 partitions each. Correct?

If they aren't being used, then it will not matter much. Though if what you have on them are system files or regularly accessed files, they may be in slower portions of the drive(s) depending on how the partitions are on the drives and which partitions store the data.
 
I have 6 physical drives (none of them SSD) and 8 logical drives, a couple of them have been split or otherwise partitioned. I also have 6 network drives. Win7-x64. Indexing on, no issues.
 
donnthom said:
I have 4 HDDs which are partitioned resulting in 12 HDDs. They are not all used and I really don't need that much storage. My Primary disk is SSD. Am I slowing up my computer by having so many hard drives???
Click to expand...

How are those hooked up? Which controller(s)?
What OS, how much memory? What kind of HDDs are those?
 
4 drives and you partition rather than RAID them? 😕

To answer your question, yes, this will hurt performance. What are you doing with the 12 separate partitions?
 
I was thinking about Raid, but I don't know much about Raid.

They are SATA drives 500GB, and partitioned for each topic like, Data, Pictures, Music..... Yes I know.....tooooo much.







My OS is W7 64bit, Main drive is 120GB SSD, Asus mobo P8Z68-V Pro/Gen3, Intel i7 2600K 3.4G, 8MB Ram
 
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In most cases, I don't see how adding another drive outside of something like a RAID array would affect your performance negatively or positively (ignoring different drive capabilities).

An example of what you could see on modern motherboards are how some boards add extra SATA ports using PCI-E lanes, but sometimes they try to add a bit too much (i.e. USB 3 as well), and you end up splitting lanes between both. While I wouldn't say that it would slow your whole PC down, it will most likely reduce the bandwidth available to both sets of devices (SATA, USB 3). I think my Gigabyte motherboard does this.

Ultimately, don't worry about it.
 
I think it will dramatically slow boot times and also there will be delays in the event a drive has to be powered up to read a file (power savings) but except for those situations I can't see how simply having that many active partitions would slow your system in any meaningful way.
 
Anteaus said:
I think it will dramatically slow boot times
Click to expand...

I assume you're talking about when the BIOS checks for devices on the SATA channels? I find this procedure is actually pretty quick overall. It only takes a few seconds (at the most) on my system that has 7 SATA devices (1 SSD, 5 HDD, 1 Optical).

I did have some massive slowdown when a device was having issues as the detection process would hang for a significantly longer amount of time on that drive.
 
Might be better off with 2 large 2tb drives. Just be more creative with using subdirectories. Maybe some server software might manage drive space better. Or you could think of building a separate computer and using it like a file server. Might want to find a way to back up some of those files, like an external backup drive.
 
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