Hard Drive Configuration - what would you do?

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Soldato
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Hi guys,

In my rig I have an old Western Digital SATA drive for my OS , which is just a mere 120gb, and for my second drive I have a Samsung Spinpoint F3 drive.

Now, on the OS drive is where I have all of my Music production software and generally where any programs get installed to on the computer ( the traditional C:/program files route) ...

I really do need to upgrade the WD as I've had it for a few years and feel it's time to replace it for that reason, and also due to the fact that I hardly have any space left on it.

I've noticed something with the Spinpoint though, whenever I access something for the first time on it (ie. open a folder ) it does that thing where it pauses, you hear the drive spinning up, then the folder opens with a slight click. Once it's performed this action it doesn't happen again - is there any reason as to why this drive is doing this? I'm on Windows 7, although I know the OS has likely nothing to do with it.

I was considering upgrading to 2 1tb Spinpoints and putting them in raid, what would be the advantages of this ? Would I be unwise in doing so with the spinning up issue aforementioned?

The other idea I had was just to remove my programs from the WD drive and reinstall them all on the Spinpoint, leaving the WD as solely an OS drive, but then I thought if I do that I could perhaps go SSD for the OS drive for the fast boot times and other advantages of SSD....

Any advice on this matter would be greatly appreciated.
 
Given the speed difference between your F3 and a vintage 120GB drive, you'd probably notice a massive improvement in moving your OS to the F3.

Easiest way to do this is probably with something to move and shrink the existing F3 partition by 120GB, and then to copy your OS partition onto the F3 in the space it makes. You can probably do that with http://partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html. You'd want to make the space at the beginning of the drive rather than the end.

Check your F3 for SMART errors first to see if that pausing, click, working is just powersaving happening (its turning the drive off when not used?) or actual problem with the drive.
 
The reason your second HDD takes a second to boot up is most likely because windows is set to "turn off hard drive after ** minutes" or something along that lines.

I am on the works XP machine so can't get into the setting but it is something like this:

Control Panel
Power options
Advanced options
then look for the "turn off HDD after" option and set it either to a longer time or never.
 
Thanks for the info fellas !

Yeah that was the reason the HDD was taking it's time booting into gear when accessed - the time was set to 20 minutes.

Any ideas on whether I should go for an SSD drive then or just get two Spinpoints and raid em up.. either one would be a first for me !
 
Never had a raid setup my self but I did plan on doing it on my next build (so 3 years ago I thought about it) but when I came to it last week I went with an SSD just because they are nippy as **** and saved me space with 2 drives.

You could be outrageous and raid 2 SSD's :D
 
Depends on how much cash you have for it. If you can, image the 120GB onto an equivalent SSD and wonder how you ever did without it before... if not, try booting off a nice modern drive and kick yourself for sticking with the old one... if you want to go RAID, just do some research before hand working out if you want, cheap, performance or resilience - cos you can pick any 2 of those 3 :)

Before you splash cash on an SSD, whats the age of your motherboard - no point in buying a brand new SSD if you dont have SATA3 - you could go for a end of life or second hand instead.
 
Both ways put your data at risk of loss if a single drive fails but that risk is not more than the setup you currently have.

The SSD will be more expensive but on the other had it will be faster, less power hungry and take up less space. Also for raid 0 (striping) you really should try to use matched drives if possible (fame revision / firmware) to prevent any issues and minimise conflicts which could lead to data loss. This is not a massive problem but more 'best practice'.

So;
SSD: More expensive, less power / heat / space.

F3 x2: Twice the power (give or take the old drive), twice the space, not as fast as SSD.

I would get something like a Vertex 2 (vertex 3 if you have SATA III) for a boot drive, keep the F3 for storage and use the old drive for backups of the SSD. A 60GB SSD will make a big difference as long as you don't mind installing to the F3 all the time you put something on. Win 7 + Office 2010 + a few bits and pieces take around 30GB on my machines. Still a bit of room for essential software that will make good use of the speed.

RB
 
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