Separate Physical Drives vs. Partition: Performance Hit?

X

xenithon

Weaksauce
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Jul 10, 2006
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Hi all. Just wanted to find out what the performance hit would be (if you'd see a real-world difference) between having two separate drives: one for the OS and one for storage; as opposed to one larger drive with a partition for the OS and the rest for storage. Reason I ask is that I will already get one drive as a pure backup drive. Question now is: will one drive suffice, with an OS partition and the rest for storing files; or will I see a marked speed difference if I get two separate drives.

Cheers,
X
 
More drives are generally faster, unless you're hitting some bus bandwidth limitation for example.

If your applications are drive-speed limited and you can take advantage of concurrent drive access, then two drives will be much faster than one -- faster because you'll be able to use two drives concurrently, and also because you won't have a single drive seeking back and forth between two locations. A file stream processing where input = one drive and output = the other, flipping back and forth where necessary, would be a classic example of two drives working much better than one.

You can also see some benefit from simpler uses by e.g. having the swap file on one drive, and data files on another, or temp files on one and data on another, etc. These would tend to make slight differences. Of course if you have heavy concurrent access for some reason, it could become significantly faster -- this might show up as a two-drive system being more responsive than a single-drive system under some large data access conditions.
 
Hi all and thanks for the prompt replies. Essentially what I use the PC for is: web browsing, email, word processing, and listening to music. The PC is semi-dedicated to listening to music so most of the time it is running foobar and playing FLAC files. On occassion I also use Photoshop, but nothing too hectic.

My existing setup has one drive dedicated for the OS and one of storage. OS drive is thus nice and clean, but the problem is that it is an 80GB drive (minimum size decent drive available here) with 9GB used for the OS/apps/setting :) . The main circumstance I can foresee for concurrent disk usage is perhaps when I am ripping new albums to FLAC, with the applications and OS on C: and the destination drive for the FLAC files on the D:

What one person suggested for the new setup is, instead of 3 drives, getting 2 drives and partitioning each into a 25GB drive and one drive with the remainder. The main HDD (C and D) will have the OS/apps on the 25GB partition, and the second partition will be used for storage. The second HDD (E and F) will have a 25GB partition dedicated to the Windows pagefile/swap and the rest will be for backup.

X

PS. haven't yet decided on Intel vs AMD. If Intel I will have option of Matrix RAID.
 
I would get everything off that drive and can it. Google today ran an article aboutr a study of thousands of the drives used and heat and use patterns had no strong failure correlation. The best indicator of ensuing drive failure was a disk error>

Thread and link to article here:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1159460
 
My initial plan was to have one drive dedicated for the OS/apps; one dedicated to storage/working files; and one as a dedicated backup drive. Thing is, the OS drive will be wasted (as mentioned, only around 10% used) - making it quite costly. If I can do it with two drives and paritioning the main drive, it would save quite a bit...as long as the performance hit won't be too bad.

I also checked up about the suggestion I got to partition the second drive too and have a dedicated drive for the swap file. But, I'll have 2GB of RAM and read that with large amounts of RAM like that, the pagefile rarely gets touched unless you do some serious memory-intensive apps (e.g. video editing).
 
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