Do 1 tb drives make for good system drives?

[madhatter81]

hello everyone, just one simple question here.

do the WD 1tb caviar b.e. make for a decent system drive or should I go with the smaller 750gb or even the 640?

they all price within 25$ on new egg so I just wonder if there was a negative side to using that large of a hdd for windows. thanx.
ps: if I get the 1tb drive I plan on splitting it into 2 500gb partitions

 

[sminlal]

Generally speaking the larger the drive, the more data is packed onto each track - that results in higher transfer rates. So the larger drive may have a bit of a performance advantage.

Using two partitions will hurt performance if you are doing a lot of access to files in both partitions. This is because the head will be forced to move back and forth halfway across the disk each time you access one partition after accessing the other.

 

[madhatter81]

so its better to not even use a partition at all? wow, that I never knew.. thanx for the information, i believe my choice is an obvious one.

 

[sminlal]

Well it's perfectly valid to create partitions in order to make management of your system easier. For example if you have the OS in one partition then you can do image backups of it without having to back up all your data (which you would normally want to use a different backup strategy for).

Personally, I prefer to use multiple disks with one partition per disk for that kind of segregation. A big part of the reason for that is that it also helps performance by keeping separating the OS and data so that I/O activity on one doesn't affect the other.

But if the second partition on the OS disk is relatively inactive, there really won't be very much of a performance hit. For example, you could use it as your archive of music and video files - those files would typically be pretty static and wouldn't really all that much I/O, even when you play them.

 

[tmike]

so its better to not even use a partition at all?

NO - your conclusion directly contradicts the responder's statement.

The boot/OS partition should be created first, and be a relatively small portion of the drive (as, of course, it would be if not extravagantly oversized).

Subsequent partitions on that same spindle should be for less-used data - such as document/video/software repositories and the like - with the ones that can tolerate the worst performance placed at the end of the spindle.

Interspersing empty space between them will make future adjustments to their sizes easier - for example, after a 30G OS partition, leave another 30-40G unused for expansion. In front of (or, after, if you don't use gparted or similar for disk management) a software library, leave a hundred or two free GB (or whatever would be appropriate headroom).

 

[madhatter81]

ahhh, understood.. thanx guys, very much appreciate the advice

 

[Pointertovoid]

It's basically the capacity per platter that matters to get throughput. Biggest now is 500GB, so on such recent disks, capacities multiples of 250GB (one face) tend to have the same speed.

Then, yes, more platters allow less arm swing... But the arm has to readjust when hopping from one platter to an other, which nearly offsets this advantage. Also, the defragmenter puts next to another the files used together, which also occupy at most 100MB together, making the effect of smaller volumes less important.

 

[madhatter81]

Best answer selected by madhatter81.