Need Some Advice...1 Hard Drive or 2 Hard Drives

[Truecrude]

So I'm gonna be building my own pc, for the first time, and I'm only going to use one Hard drive, WD Cavalier Black 500gb.
Now I've noticed that a lot of ppl use 2 drives, one drive for OS and the other as storage. Why do ppl do that? I'm already a bit over my budget so I'm not sure if a second drive is necessary, but if getting another drive is worth it because it avoids some problems or something then I rather spend some extra money and get it now. Basically what are the pros and cons for having 1 or 2 Hard Drives.

 

[xsever]

Having your OS on one drive and your data on the other helps keep the OS drive less fragmented. If you are on a tight budget, the price difference for having two drives is not justifiable. You will not see major speed improvement for using 2 drives. Keep in mind that you should make 1 partition for the OS and applications, and another one for storage such as musics files, pictures, etc..

On the other hand, a lot of people use 2 drives to backup their data since the risk is higher if everything is on 1 drive.

 

[Jonmor68]

The adantages of a second drive are that you can use it as a backup for data and an image backup of your systems drive. While you can make a second partition to do this on one drive, in the event of a hard drive failure the partition backup is useless.
Hard drives are very cheap now and you don't have to have a 500 GB drive for the OS a smaller one will do and use the larger one for storing your data files, like music, photos and videos.
So while a seond drive is not necessary, it can be very usefull so an extra $50 now may save your bacon later.

 

[Truecrude]

how do you make a partition?
And what do you mean by applications?

 

[xsever]

Applications are software you install like Firefox, Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer, etc...

As for partitions, which operating system are you going to run?

 

[Truecrude]

I'm going to run Windows 7 Ultimate Edition version 7600

 

[xsever]

Read this:

http://www.partition-tool.com/resource/partition-windows-7.htm

 

[Truecrude]

thx a lot.

 

[xsever]

Please rate my answer as "Best Answer" under it.

Thank you and good luck.

 

[Truecrude]

how?

 

[xsever]

There is a button under my post on the bottom right that says "Select as Best Answer".

Thank you.