are 2 harddrives better than one??

M

makaveli3004

New Member
So im building my new computer tomorrow. Would rather for example go with 2 250 gb harddrives with raid 0 or 1 500 gb harddrive.
 
well raid 0 is striped, it will split data evenly where performance is desired and data integrity is not important e.g gaming but if you need more space to store data then go for the 500gb.
 
I would say go for the 2, its handy when something goes wrong and you need to reload the system. Just make sure that only the windows files are on one of the hard drives and store all your installed programs and stuff on the other hard drive. I.E get an 80GB HDD for windows or any other operating system and get a 300GB for your data.

Hope this helps.
 
I would say 2 drives too....

pcmanlee said:
I would say go for the 2, its handy when something goes wrong and you need to reload the system. Just make sure that only the windows files are on one of the hard drives and store all your installed programs and stuff on the other hard drive. I.E get an 80GB HDD for windows or any other operating system and get a 300GB for your data.
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I would say 2, but don't bother with RAID. If one drive fails, and you have a RAID set-up, you lose everything on the other drive.

If you have 2 drives, and keep them separate, then yes, this is better. You can reinstall Windows repeatedly, and keep all your music, videos etc on your secondary drive.
 
Adam135 said:
Can you recover the data from the hard drive that has failed on Raid 0 eaiser than normal?
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There are utilities that let you recover part of the data, since its split about 50/50 between two drives. So if one fails, you should still have about half your data.
 
2 is better, especially if you only have a little Ram. (you set your swap to the second drive on its own partition) its not better than ram but its better than 1 drive. I find this works best if they are on seperate IDE cables, or SATA.

plus you can save all the drivers and your music/downloads so you don't have to rebuy the music and refind the drivers/downloads when the microsoft product they call "stable" craps itself again.

theres not a time when 1 is better than two for home computing, except when your buying them.

I wouldn't run them in raid though, unless your a server. makes things complicated and the performance gain could be outdone with more ram instead. good luck with your decision.
 
i have a raid 0 set up with 2 36gig raptors. i would have been just as happy with one 74 gig raptor. but for safety, i keep no Important files on the raptors. only my OS. all personal files go on my 200 gig drive. but keeping personal files on a separate HD is something ill always do.
 
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thealmightyone said:
If you have 2 drives, and keep them separate, then yes, this is better. You can reinstall Windows repeatedly, and keep all your music, videos etc on your secondary drive.
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yes this is true, but you can also create a partition on one big 500GB drive, use 100GB for windows and installed files, etc. then 400gb to store the important data, if you need to reinstall windows then just format the small partition. That is how I have mine set 100GB and 200GB and I have re-installed the operating system twice now. Still, personal preference.
 
Man, talk about diverse answers here! I'm not even going to try with some of them, but here's my outlook on two drives.

Hard drives have gotten much faster over time, but they are still one of the slowest parts of the computer. Having a RAID 0 setup between two drives would speed up performance, but over all, your random access time won't improve that much. I ran a pair of Raptor 36.7G drives once and wasn't all that impressed. It was faster than my current setup, but nothing really amazing.

Someone mentioned using a drive for the swap file. Not a good idea. Yes, if you can dedicate a slave drive where most of the resources are used for the swap file, it would improve over using the primary drive. However, if you totally eliminate the swap file and have extra RAM, there will be no comparison in performance...

At least one person hit on the heat issue. Now I've never compared my drives running idle and under use, but I feel quite sure you'd get more heat and use more power with two drives working together than just one.

I've also had very bad luck with some hard drives as of recently. As someone mentioned, when you have two drives, that doubles your chance for failure. Unless you're using RAID 1 or something, you're that much more likely to loose your data. Running a master and slave(storage) drive would probably be a better option, you could still easilly loose your data without backups.

Um...there not much else I care to ramble on... In short...go with a single drive setup. Or a Master/Slave setup. If you have a decent performing drive, you'll be just fine.
 
All 3 of my computers run an OS HD and a Spare HD for storing files and backing up materials. 2 of the systems also have External Drives for back up as well.
 
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