Two hard drives better than one?

[Rob001]

Are there any performance gains to be had by using two hard drives over one? Not in RAID, but by just optimizing where certain things go, such as the page file, seperating programs from the OS, etc. Or will having all my docs/games/programs/music/etc on a single drive be just as good?

 

[Ockie]

It would really depend on what you are doing and how you configure it, but in general yes, there should be small improvements.

 

[DonDon]

The one thing I know that will give a modest performance boost is to put the paging file on a separate drive from the OS. Especially if you are short on memory. Shouldn't really be an issue these days though.

Other things like putting the programs and data on separate drives or partitions is more of a convenience than a performance booster.

Don

 

[nick8571]

If you do a lot of multimedia work - video/audio encoding and so on, it can be useful to have two separate drives as source and destination. That way they can be reading and writing simultaneously, rather than a single drive (or a RAID array for that matter) having to go read - seek - write - seek - read, etc...

Photoshop also likes to have its scratch file on a different physical disk from the pagefile, although I don't suppose most users deal with big enough images to make it a real issue with modern hardware.

 

[xenotype]

2 harddrives > 1 harddrive

in fact, n+1 harddrives > n harddrives

 

[GJSNeptune]

The one thing I know that will give a modest performance boost is to put the paging file on a separate drive from the OS.

In addition, it is recommended to still keep a paging file on the OS drive.

 

[defy]

I have 2 of the new wd 640gb drives.

Originally, I was considering doing a raid-0 setup (have never tried it before). Would it be more efficient on the drives to run OS/apps/games on one drive, and music/movies/media on the second drive?

I'm almost always running mp3's/movies/encoding or editing media in the background when I game or etc, and I was thinking this separation would minimize the drive heads thrashing around on the drive trying to simultaneously access multiple parts of the drive.

I'm not totally sure on that, so just thought I would ask.

 

[Hulkamaniac]

I have one raptor as the OS drive, two raptors in raid0 as my games/apps drive, and a POS 750gb as a storage drive, /pics/mp3s/nudie movies etc.

I've been using an arrangement like that for many years and have been happy with it.

 

[defy]

nudie movies!

I was actually hoping the "new" raptors would be out by now and I would run that as my OS drive, and raid these 2 for storage/media. But I don't think they've even released preliminary release dates or specs on them.