2 harddrives or just 1?

[ailevation]

I am building a new system, and I plan on getting an 80 gig SATA with a 8mb cache for my OS and applications and a 500 gig SATA 32mb cache for games, music, pictures and movies. I wanted 2 separate drives for performance reasons. Is it really worth it having this type of setup or am I just fine with just the 500 gig drive?

 

[Sanada]

For performance reasons there's little point. You'd be better of getting the 500GB and partitioning it, one for OS with anything you'd install and one for personel files.

 

[Krynn72]

Why would you want a worse one for your OS?

 

[ailevation]

8 mb cache for an 80 gig hd is good, anything higher won't have noticeable gains anyhow. It's actually not worse, more like relative.

 

[Asus]

If you are going for single task performance then get a single large fast drive, like a WD (Caviar) 640GB or 750GB. Their 500GB drives work as well if you are on a budget. Make your partitions to separate stationary files (OS,Apps,Storage) from areas that get written to and deleted a lot (eg. downloads folder). That way you can defrag and adding/deleting files say from downloading won't fragment files again with your OS. If you want, make partitions to separate OS from Apps or storage but that won't change performance since those files will move really.

If you want multi-task performance then get 2 fast drives. Example, creating the files needed to burn a homemade DVD while copying files or watching a video at the same time.

 

[lefty]

3 harddrives.

 

[Operational]

Get two 500GB drives and RAID 0 them. Then have one 50-60GB partition for Windows and make the rest of the space into another partition for your games, documents, music, etc.

At least that's what I've done :dork:

 

[ailevation]

Yeah RAID 0 sounds nice but I am on a budget and already stretched it out a bit with the thought of this extra 80 gig hd. I guess i'll go for one HD but with a little bit more space as 2 hd's(not in raid0) isn't going to open up to any much more performance for single task stuff like gaming, which is my main concern.

 

[McGooTheWise]

Why don't they just move up to terabyte and get it over with?

YOU CAN'T BEAT MY 400 PETABYTE HARDDRIVE!

 

[Operational]

Why don't they just move up to terabyte and get it over with?

There have been 1TB hard drives out for ages, but in terms of $$/GB your better off with two 500GB drives.

 

[JFry]

I have a similar setup. 80 gb OS/games drive and a 300 gb for music and videos. Partitioning would have basically the same effect I suppose but I can say I'm very happy with this setup.