Two Hard diskor one??

Blane101

Blane101

Blane101

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Joined
16 Sep 2008
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4
Hello everyone,
I am new to this forum and have a question on the best way forward.

I am upgrading my machine in the next month or two and am trying to get my head around the best way to work HDD.

Reading some of the posts they seem to suggest having two drives in your machine, one for the OS (Vista) and one for the programs/games/data etc..

My question is - does windows work better on its own drive? Does the OS do stuff whilst accessing data for games off a seperate drive thereby decreasing load times?

Should I go RAID 0? Will it decrease load / access times that much or will one big drive do the job when it holds the OS and all progs / games etc.

I am limited to about £80 for my HDD as most money will go on the chip and graphics card.

Any thoughts would be most greatfully recieved.
 
CLAIMED :D

I don't believe in putting Windows on a separate drive (some claim it saves a full install if Windows goes bad) as I have found 99% of my Program's/APP's/Games all need reinstalled anyhow so that argument about it meaning you only need reinstall Windows is kinda poor IMO as it takes longer to get it all working again than to full install.

Raid0 has benefits of speed but Seeks go up in Raid so if your using 7.2K RPM HDD's they have a higher Seek to start with over say a VelicoRaptor.
 
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how much space do you want/need?

i'd keep it all on one drive, maybe a 2nd partition for Documents & files on the drive

and get a 2nd drive (possibly external) for backing up files.

Western Digital 640gb drives are really fast, and nice & quiet


welcome to the forums :)
 
I have an external drive to keep all my stuff backed up on so I have that covered.

I guess you guys recommend just using one single drive but get a good one like the WD 640.
 
raid 0 is awesome (until recently i ran 2x10000rpm raptors in raid 0 for about 4 years), but the performance between that and newer hard drives is only really noticeable in benchmarks nowadays, wheras when i first had that, it tramped all over anything available at the time

now i just use a 640gb drive on it's own, didn't notice any real life performance drop (besides copying large files etc, but i don't often do that), it's far from 'slow' at around 90-100 mb / s copying speed

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-198-WD
 
As recommended you can use 1 hard disk & partition BUT also keep regular back-ups of unrecoverable stuff i.e. docs, pics, e-mails, etc.

I've partitioned as follows:
  • 30GB for Windows & programs
  • 60GB for documents, pictures & game installs
  • 50GB for music (used just about half)
Videos, encoding & backup of documents is on a 2nd HD in the machine (+ regular DVD±R's backups)
 
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I'd go for two of the 320 GB Samsung drives and run them in raid 0, very fast and plenty of storage. Backup important data on a flash or external.
 
I wouldn't trust the Sammy's after all failures and they ain't a Tier 1 HDD Manu anyhow.

The RE3 is made for Raid (does not mean its not suited for non Raid).

I will again get the info someone kindly posted on it.

HMM, I cant find the post of the copy I made of it just the other day. (GOING MAD), it was feature list of the diff's with the RE3 over other HDD's.
 
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