would/nt 3 hard drives be optimum for a heavy downloader?

SilenceOfTheFans · Post by **SilenceOfTheFans** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 6:09 pm

A friend of mine has 2 hard drives in his machine, one master and one slave because apparently the master is slow if downloading at the same time?

However i wonder if all the writing and rewriting multiple files on the long term storage drive would cause significantly premature failure and loss of all content?
Would the best arrangement (tho sadly far from the quietest) not be to have a drive for the master, a drive to download to and a drive for long term storage? The first operating for a reasonable span, the second perishing much sooner but at no loss and the third lasting far longer with minimal writing and mostly reading (which id imagine is a lot less wearing?)
what do you guys think?

thepwner · Post by **thepwner** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 6:41 pm

Master? Slave? Are talking about IDE drives? Dude let me boot up my Windows 95 PC and like work in Microsoft paint on my 15" beige plastic CRT monitor...dude get out of the stone age.

SilenceOfTheFans · Post by **SilenceOfTheFans** » Thu Jun 11, 2009 9:30 pm

They're all SATA2 Samsung HD502LJ drives, i just have a bad habit of still calling them master for primary system drive (C) and slave for the secondary, storage, drive (D)

i forget the correct terminology, care to remind me?

psiu · Post by **psiu** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 8:28 am

thepwner wrote:Master? Slave? Are talking about IDE drives? Dude let me boot up my Windows 95 PC and like work in Microsoft paint on my 15" beige plastic CRT monitor...dude get out of the stone age.

I did chuckle at that...

IDE isn't that old though, haha. Anyways writing and rewriting shouldn't do anything too harmful--in fact if anything it should make sure the data doesn't slowly corrupt over time. Is he re-imaging the primary drive every time, or just adding files to the secondary drive?

K.Murx · Post by **K.Murx** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 11:20 am

I can not fathom a private internet connection that could put any significant wear and tear onto a hard drive. Do you have a permanently maxed out Gigabit connection or what?
And even if, what the heck are you doing with all that data?

We have scratch disks, which get written to from the local machines. The amount of data throughput is usually in the range of a couple Gigabytes every 30 minutes, day and night. There are no failures that I am aware of related to "wear and tear".

So, forget about that

However, do back up important data regularily on an external medium (not another HDD in the same case!).

SilenceOfTheFans · Post by **SilenceOfTheFans** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 12:32 pm

that is great news, so could one go as far as to say that downloading to the storage drive would not decrease hard drive life span or realiability or increase chance of failure? (at least not enough to notice, as they will be replaced by SSD in a few years when big drives are reasonably priced)
Thanks for all the input guys

ShadowVlican · Post by **ShadowVlican** » Fri Jun 12, 2009 12:34 pm

my retired tablet does 24/7 BT duty with its single 4200rpm drive... seems to hold up fine