Using files from a slower hard drive on a faster hard drive

[lations]

Hi guys, I am new to all this since I just now ordered my first desktop (wont have it for another week).

I will have two 150GB velociraptors in raid 0. I will also have a 1.5 TB drive at 7200 (and will get more of these later).

I plan on putting my OS, applications for encoding, games and such on the velociraptors.

My question is this:

If I have something like i-tunes on the velociraptor to keep things moving fast, does that mean my music needs to be on the velociraptors to get that performance increase?

More importantly, if I have dvd's stored on the 1.5 TB drive, will I be able to use Windows Media Center from the velociraptors to access those dvds? I really want to stream dvd's from the 1.5 TB drive using programs on the velociraptors and send it to something like my Xbox. I have read that streaming such videos can be demanding on the computer and requires as much speed as possible.

ANY knowledge surrounding this topic in general would be GREATLY appreciated. I am new to this and I want to be able to set up my new desktop efficiently and organized from the start.

 

[spinny]

Programs don't care what hard drive the files you are using them are on, as long as it's in your system and they can see it. So having your music and video on your larger hard drive and your programs on the faster one works fine.

Streaming music and video is not demanding on any decent 7200 RPM hard drive, unless perhaps the video is extremely high resolution (DVD resolution is not a problem). So unless you are editing it, you dont' need to worry about keeping it on the faster hard drive. Mainly people run into problems with the speed of their wireless networks while trying to stream video.

 

[lations]

Thanks, so I guess my question becomes whether I wasted my money on the velociraptors in the first place. If the programs on them are using files that are coming from the 7200 drive, it seems they wont be running any faster than if the applications were on the 7200 drive as well.

I guess I would love some examples of how the velociraptors can be used to improve speed on something other than the actual OS or games (since those things will never take up 300 GB)

 

[sminlal]

If the programs on them are using files that are coming from the 7200 drive, it seems they wont be running any faster than if the applications were on the 7200 drive as well.

You said you were using media centre, so I assume you're playing sound files or watching video clips. That type of application runs at a fixed speed, and all hard drives these days are plenty fast enough to handle that.

Where a fast drive WILL help, though, is to speed up booting the OS and starting up your programs when you click on them. To do that, you have to put the OS and applications on the fast drive. Leaving your music and video files on the slower drive shouldn't be an issue (unless the drive is very badly fragmented, in which case running the disk defragmenter will probably solve the problem).

 

[Paperdoc]

The "streaming such videos can be demanding on the computer and requires as much speed as possible" story refers especially to actually playing those videos back so you can watch them The decoding and rendering processes take a lot of processing power in the CPU, the video card, or both. But the simple process of reading the data from a hard disk takes little work and no modern hard drive will slow you down doing that. If you are simply copying a file from your computer's big drive to another unit like your Xbox, you'll have no problem In fact, I suspect the time limiter there may be the speed of the connection between your computer and the Xbox. And even that, I believe, is fast enough that you could be watching the video on the Xbox at the same time - in other words, data transfer can happen faster than video rendering, anyway.

 

[eyemaster]

You can put your programs where ever you want. It doesn't matter on the drive except for when it's loading itself to memory. Once the program is started up, it'll go the speed your cpu/ram can run it, it is not dependent on HDD. Only the Data feed is dependent on the HDD speed, so put the data on the fastest drive.