1 TB or two 500GB?

Some pointers:
1. Two 500GB's are more reliable than a single 1TB, as if one fails, you have another. If 1TB fails, you would have a heart attack losing so much data.
2. 1TB would officially give you a little bit more storage space than 2x500GB. As we all know that 500GB specification doesn't actually mean 500GB on OS.

Two drives will perform better as you can put the OS on 1 drive and the pagefile on the other drive.

1 drive would have less power consumption

its more of a personal preference thing nothing to really sweet over unless you have less then 4 sata ports but that shouldnt be a problem as most motherboards now come with 6 or more sata ports on the mobo

Some more pointers:
1. How many HDDs can you fit into your case?
2. Do you or will you have more than 1TB of Data?
3. Does your system use IDE or SATA HDDs?
4. How much are you willing to spend on the HDDs? ie. In New Zealand for SATA HDDs 2x 500GB costs $168 and 1x 1TB costs $138 or $142

Putting it all together, it your call! Also keep the things mentioned here in mind. I guess since you are buying 1TB it would be SATA. IDE's don't have 1TB, do they?

I don't they do make an IDE 1TB HDD, but as hell_storm said the system that you want to build is totally up to you, and we can just advise you zjmaniak on what to put in your new system

Solution, Use 2 1TB Drives

+ 1. I vote for this solution.

I think it depends on how much storage he has now and how much he envisions he might have in the future. If you don't accumulate data much or don't have tons of videos or songs or whatever takes up a lot of space, then he could do with the 500GB drives. But, I think it's better to be safe and prepare for the future. It's also good as some posters have said, that having less drives in your machine is better than more and you can do this more easily with higher capacity drives so therefore, 1TB over the 500GB drives.

Only if losing 500GB is acceptable. If any data loss is unacceptable, then the single 1TB drive is more reliable (assuming an equal failure rate). Of course, the best solution in my opinion is 2 1TB drives, one of which could be used for backups.


They would give you exactly the same amount of space. 500GB actually means 500GB which means 500 billion bytes. 1TB actually means 1TB which means 1 trillion bytes. Unfortunately, Windows does not use the standard metric prefixes, and instead uses base 2 prefixes which are somewhat close. As a result, Windows thinks that tera means 2^40 and giga means 2^30. These numbers are slightly larger than 1 trillion and 1 billion respectively, and as a result, Windows will cause your drives to appear a bit undersized, even though they actually contain the advertised number of bytes.