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Using Two Hard Drives

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I will be building a new system and so far I have purchased a Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB drive. My original intent was to use only this drive. I'm contemplating using two drives, the first for the OS, games, and applications, the second for storage of music, pictures, videos. Will I see any performance advantage? If i decide to go this route would a Caviar Green be ideal for the second storage drive? I assume that I don't need any RAID configuration, since the second drive is only for storage.

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I always build my systems with separate OS and data drives because (a) it isolates the usually busy OS disk, and (b) it's a nice separation for managing backups and recovering from OS problems without any impact on the data.

The only thing to watch out for with the green drives is that they spin down after several seconds of inactivity, and this often means pauses of 2-3 seconds when you try to access something on the drive.

A second HDD is a must have as long as you care about performance, It is like the difference between single core and dual core. And nothing can bottleneck a high end system more than a busy HDD.

sminlal said:
I always build my systems with separate OS and data drives because (a) it isolates the usually busy OS disk, and (b) it's a nice separation for managing backups and recovering from OS problems without any impact on the data.

The only thing to watch out for with the green drives is that they spin down after several seconds of inactivity, and this often means pauses of 2-3 seconds when you try to access something on the drive.


So, you install the OS on two drives? I will be getting Windows Vista Home Premium 64 with free Windows 7 upgrade, which offers only one license. Can I install it more than once on the same computer?

Finally, for installing the OS on the second drive, I place the disc in the optical drive, reboot, go into the BIOS and make the second drive boot and from then on it's the same as the first install?

If these are IDE drive, the first thing to do with the 2nd drive is to install it on another controller, not on the same controller as the primary drive.

The next thing to do for performance is to place the swap file, temp directory, and your browser cache on to a partition on the 2nd drive........

This split the I/O over both channels.....
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