A question regarding multiple hard drive systems

Pratyay67 · Nov 2, 2016

While I myself have a system running on a 2 TB SATA and one 240 GB SSD, lately I'm seeing builds with 4 or even more HDDs in a single system.

I came across a build where 5 HDDs were used.
A-Data premier SP550 120 GB SSD.
Two samsung 850 EVOs, one 250 GB and one 500 GB.
One WD red 3TB 3.5'' 5400 rpm
One WD caviar blue 1TB 3.5'' 7200 rpm

How does a system with such diversified hard drives, help?

blazorthon · Nov 2, 2016

I don't understand what you're asking. Someone just happened to expand their storage in this way. There isn't any problem associated with having a lot of storage drives other than you need to watch where you put your data and there isn't much of an advantage other than if one fails, you still have the others.

13thmonkey · Nov 2, 2016

it doesn't, but they've probably just collected HDD's as prices dropped, and didn't get rid of the old ones, doesn't help, doesn't hurt (much)

Pratyay67 · Nov 2, 2016

Oh, then it was kinda stupid of me to ask the obvious! Hehe.

But the build was a fresh one, not an upgradation or expansion.

blazorthon · Nov 2, 2016

The builder might have moved those drives from a previous build.

Math Geek · Nov 2, 2016

there is a few uses for having multiple drives depending on what you do with a system. a hdd can only read or write at any given moment. so when doing tasks that asks the drive to read or write a ton of info works faster if it is being done on it's own drive. for instance when encoding video, i found it A LOT faster to have it read from one drive and be written to a second drive. went from 100 fps processed to a good 175 fps if i recall right. back in the day when i used to have torrents running 24/7, this was done form it's own drive. again tons of read/write on the drive and anything else trying to run from the drive would have been slowed down a lot waiting it's turn to get the data it needed.

your programs and OS need to read from the hdd as well. so trying to open a program while the drive is busy will mean the program has to wait for the drive to finish doing whatever else it is doing at the time. slowing everything down. (like you see when starting up the pc. takes a minute for anything to open as it finishes booting up and running background tasks)

one pc in my house runs as a media server, again media is on it's own drive so that it can feed the needs of the house without keeping that main hdd busy and allowing the pc to be used for other things. cpu usage is almost nill but the drive can be very busy for long periods.

any other uses that would require the hdd to stay busy would benefit from being done on it's own drive or even between 2 drives. i have 4 drives in my man pc with one for the os/programs, one for data and 2 more for working with media files. source on one, output on the other. you get the idea

Pratyay67 · Nov 2, 2016

Math Geek :

there is a few uses for having multiple drives depending on what you do with a system. a hdd can only read or write at any given moment. so when doing tasks that asks the drive to read or write a ton of info works faster if it is being done on it's own drive. for instance when encoding video, i found it A LOT faster to have it read from one drive and be written to a second drive. went from 100 fps processed to a good 175 fps if i recall right. back in the day when i used to have torrents running 24/7, this was done form it's own drive. again tons of read/write on the drive and anything else trying to run from the drive would have been slowed down a lot waiting it's turn to get the data it needed.

one pc in my house runs as a media server, again media is on it's own drive so that it can feed the needs of the house without keeping that main hdd busy and allowing the pc to be used for other things. cpu usage is almost nill but the drive can be very busy for long periods.

any other uses that would require the hdd to stay busy would benefit from being done on it's own drive or even between 2 drives. i have 4 drives in my man pc with one for the os/programs, one for data and 2 more for working with media files. source on one, output on the other. you get the idea

Thank you! That in many words is exactly what I needed to know.

Math Geek · Nov 2, 2016

you're welcome. took me a long time to figure this piece of info out as i tried to encode a video and use the system from the same drive.

seems like such a simple concept but took me forever to figure it out and so many others don't seem to have figured it out either.

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A question regarding multiple hard drive systems

Pratyay67

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Math Geek

blazorthon

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13thmonkey

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Pratyay67

Honorable

blazorthon

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Math Geek

Titan

Pratyay67

Honorable

Math Geek

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