What's quicker - 2 drives or a partitioned drive?

Bananadude · 7 Dec 2006 at 16:54

What would be quicker - x2 200gb hardrives, or a 400gb partioned into 2? Assuming that the hard drives in question would be SATA2 and the same model.

rpstewart · 7 Dec 2006 at 17:02

It depends what you're doing really. If you set the 2x200Gb up as a RAID0 array you might see better application load times than with the single drive but at the expense of the risk of losing all data if one drive fails.

If you do a lot of data movement (video editing etc) then it might be better to have 2 separate drives so that you're not reading and writing with the same set of disk heads.

Bananadude · 7 Dec 2006 at 17:06

I would be using them for data, not for OS or programmes, so the 2 drives seems the better option in that case. Should they be Raided though? I don't really like the idea of increasing the chance of failure unless it's going to give me a really significant improvement.

rpstewart · 7 Dec 2006 at 17:32

If it's only for data then I wouldn't bother using RAID, the drawbacks outweigh the benefits in this case.

Mattus · 7 Dec 2006 at 20:11

Overall, the 200GB drives will be quicker. By partitioning a drive you don't really increase its speed - you still have one physical drive with one set of heads. If you have different sets of data which you'll be accessing simultaneously, put them on different drives for the performance increase.

Of course, that's what RAID0 does on a much more efficient level, but you will lose the lot if one of the drives dies...