Is having two hard drives inefficiant?

[Drastik]

Would it be more efficiant to have a single hard drive installed that is 200gb than if you have two hard drives installed that were 100gb each?

 

[johnb35]

I would either have 2 drives or 1 drive with 2 or more partitions. 1 drive or partition for operating system and programs and the second drive or second partition from your first drive for your data.

 

[lawson_jl]

Partitioning a drive doesn't improve performace with modern drives. In fact it will reduce performance on the drive since the heads will have to move between partitions. Coping data from one partition to another in particular takes a big performance hit. Also the indexing done in Vista and Windows 7 is slowed down.

Alot of people (including myself in the past) has used 2 drives. Typically one for the OS and program and a second one for data such as music, videos, documents. This used to offer a advantage in the "old" days. Windows Vista and Windows 7 are both much better at not getting fragmented. You are risking data if you don't back up the data drive.

Personally I still use a two drive system in a modified way. One drive for the OS, Programs and Data. The second drive I use as back up for Documents, Videos, Photos, Music, Favorites and Game saves. I use SyncToy 2 from Microsoft for my back up software but there are others. This way if you have a drive failure you won't lose date.

If you partition a drive and it crashes you will lose data both system and date.
If you use two differnt drives and the drive with your data crashes you will lose the data.

Someone has a quote in their signature that says "Data you don't have two copies of is data you don't care about." That pretty much sums up data back up.

 

[Cromewell]

Partitioning a drive doesn't improve performace with modern drives. In fact it will reduce performance on the drive since the heads will have to move between partitions. Coping data from one partition to another in particular takes a big performance hit.

If you parition and store your data on the rigt paritions it actually does speed up your drive. You are right, copying partition to partition is no faster but saying partitions makes your drive slower isn't right. It's possible to partition your drive in a way that you can store your most used files on the fastest part of the disk and improve performance.

If you create a partition at the outer/leading edge of your drive (*1), and install your operating system & applications there .. and use the inner/slower parts of the disk for storing files that don't require access during normal system operating (i.e. downloads, drivers, back-ups, Ghost images, etc.) .. you'll limit/restrict your drive's seeks to the fastest part of the drive.