Two or One HD?

SamD · Post by **SamD** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 5:46 am

I was wondering about something. This is all about internal 3.5 hard drives. Imagine having 100 GB of windows and programs and 400 GB of data. Is it better to have 2 hard disks, one for Windows and programs and one for data? Or is it just overkill and one HD with 2 partitions is enough? Does it have any noticeable effect on the performance?

Ryan Norton · Post by **Ryan Norton** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 6:35 am

Well, I can't give you performance based reasons, but I have a 74GB Raptor and a 250GB Seagate, and it's REALLY nice to be able to format and reinstall XP at the drop of a hat without having to worry about backing up all my Office docs, saved games, pictures, downloaded apps, etc.

All that stuff is on my Seagate, drive D:\, and I use TweakUI to replace the default user shell folders with ones on D:\, so that all a format entails is XP setup, game reinstallation, and drivers that are already present in Windows Explorer. It's great!

SamD · Post by **SamD** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 7:46 am

Yes, thatâ€™s important, but I can already do that with my one HD and 2 partitions. I delete, reformat and reinstall anytime I want my Windows partition with no worrying of damaging my data partition.

Arvo · Post by **Arvo** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 9:32 am

All depends on your disk usage pattern.

If you're using disk-intensive tasks then it is much faster to use more disks - reading from one, writing to another (like me - I'm capturing TV with near-lossloss codec, then I'm processing it; I can't imagine to use same disk for processing source an target - major slowdown occurs). So it is nice to have pagefile on different disk than browser cache (or photoshop temporary folder) - both can be accessed very often, using two disks reduces seeks substantially.

But if you have 1GB+ RAM and are usually just surfing or using office applications, then there'll be almost no difference.

Das_Saunamies · Post by **Das_Saunamies** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 1:09 pm

Redundancy provides reliability. If you have two drives you can keep physical duplicates of files and halve the chances of them getting destroyed. That's something to consider, and one of the reasons why I keep 3 HDDs.

Popup · Post by **Popup** » Tue Sep 18, 2007 3:10 am

SamD wrote: This is all about internal 3.5 hard drives. Imagine having 100 GB of windows and programs and 400 GB of data. Is it better to have 2 hard disks, one for Windows and programs and one for data?

Why 3.5"?

I'm contemplating using a suspended 2.5" drive for OS, swap and applications (maybe 120Gb or so), and using an existing 500Gb 3.5" drive for data. (And mirror important data on both drives). Sure, the 2.5" drive will probably be a little bit slower, but it shouldn't really be noticeable in real life. And it will definitively be quieter - and this is silentpcreview, after all.

Two or One HD?

Two or One HD?

Re: Two or One HD?