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Does an additional high speed hard drive help?

Forum Storage : Hard Disks - Does an additional high speed hard drive help?

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mcgyver76   11-02-2009 at 03:29:10 AM

I've heard that installing an additional high end hard drive will speed up my machine. I bought a Western Digital Velociraptor 300GB and installed it, and used windows 7 storage utility to make a simple partition and now it is recognized in windows.

My question at this point is: where do I go from here? Do I install a fresh copy of windows 7 on the new hard drive and leave everything else on the old one? How do I configure this to work? I'm a noob to computers, so bear with me... I don't know what RAID means but I've seen it in the BIOS before and read a little about it. Do I need to utilize it?

Thanks a million!

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Bronze Storage badge sub mesa   11-02-2009 at 03:45:10 AM

It generally makes sense to split your data in two parts:

1) system drive containing the Operating System (windows), installed Programs (photoshop etc.) and Games

2) user-created data files such as movies, music, large binary files (ISO; RAR) etc.

It' s generally best to separate these two kind of files. But otherwise, using two harddrives isn't going to speedup your system.

RAID is a technology to combine multiple harddrives into one virtual one, with advantages like speed and/or reliability. If you don't understand RAID you shouldn't be using it though.

If you really want an increase in speed; buy a Solid State Drive (SSD) such as Intel X25-M 80GB G2. Don't use it to store your personal files, but use it to store system files (see 1) above) - this will make booting and launching applications go extremely fast.

------------------------------ ...man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.
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