I'm looking to buy a new computer and was wondering whether, aside from less risk of breakdown, there's any advantage of dual hard drives? For instance would 2x160 be better than 1x320 GB.

Would the effect be the same as partitioning one drive?

I'd add that at present I use an external hard drive to back up, plus the Mozy online back up service.

P.S. I've heard of people putting the operating system on one drive, and data on the other. Is this just safer, or is there a speed gain?

This post has been edited by Steve Burke: May 31 2009, 09:46 AM

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most new machines are now SATA (the ide drive maybe supported but limited) SATA can have RAID which means you can have several small drives .
the idea is (i have only 1 SATA drive at the moment) if one drive dies all its data is on the others as well ,install a new drive and i think the others put everything back on it.

as i say i have just the one SATA drive and 1 IDE so RAID isnt switched on on my machine to know how it works real life.
RAID isnt new but it was confined to servers in the past i suppose till the price of drives and onboard controllers dropped.
i tend to save important stuff on several drives and the odd DVD as well for safety so nothings lost but time reinstalling everything if a drive dies.

having the operating system on one drive or partition really doesnt have a an advantage as if you reinstall the operating system the links to the programs on the other drive were lost as well so will need reinstalling anyway.
a prog that trundled through your drives reinstating all the allocations and links that were lost for the programs would be a very handy prog indeed

This post has been edited by chesters1: May 31 2009, 02:08 PM

Steve - the short answer here is that for the way you want to use your PC, there is no real advantage to either method assuming the drive speeds are similar for both sizes.

The long answer is ... long and while fun for us techie types, would not be useful enough to be worth reading.

I opted for a smaller but faster drive for the Dell Peggy's just got, i.e. 160GB/7200rpm instead of the standard 250GB/5400rpm. Neither of us are likely to use anywhere near 160GB. This cut the price by a fair bit.

Dell have offered me a similar deal, although the standard drive is now 320GB/5400rpm. However at the moment they won't downgrade smaller than a 250GB/7200rpm spec despite still having Peggy's drive available.

If our needs were to change during the lifetime of the machine presumably we could add another internal or external drive, probably at a lower price by then?

This post has been edited by Steve Burke: May 31 2009, 07:47 PM

yes easily just a case of plugging one in and via windows partitioning and formatting it and away you go

Thanks guys.

I've gone with the 250GB/7200rpm option as there was no further reduction for a smaller high speed drive.

Is there any benefit in my partitioning the drive? As I said I'm not likely to need anywhere near the full capacity, on my current machine I've used only just over 50GB.

partitioning has advantages ,if your wanted files (pics ,texts etc etc) are kept on a different partition if say windows goes tits up (fairly common) you can reinstall windows back on drive (partition) C and all the other partitions would be fine ,if its really bad you can format "C" without losing to much stuff.
if the whole disk died everything would be lost though so backups are a must but its nice having files "close" on the same drive.
partitioning also gets you better storage as windows can cram more data in smaller doodas (cant remember the name off hand) but with a big drive your not squeezing anything so on todays drives its less of a prob.
if it were mine i would partition it 50gig (as C) and 2 X 100gig (D & E) BUT your CD /DVD drive will "move" up a letter or two if it has the same drive letter as any partition .
IE if your pc had just the one disk with a single partition you would have (probably) C as the Hard drive D as the DVD drive ,on a 3 partition drive your DVD would be F ,its no problem if your reinstalling everything but a problem if the drives a second drive as installed stuff will be looking for the DVD drive where it used to be ,but that can be reasigned down to "D" again in windows if you need to
if you try plugging in the old drive as the master drive windows will have a fit and probably bad things will happen.
as yours is a new pc then everything is fresh ,you can clone your old drive or use windows "files and settings transfer wizard" which is fairly good so you end up with it looking the same as the old one but you still have to reinstall all the non windows progs.
cloning it is usually ok but with everything nothing is 100% perfect so both maybe wise.
with windows on one partition install new stuff on another leaving the windows partition to windows and little else ,mines on a 20 gig partition which is just big enough for windows and those annoying progs that like "c" and nothing else to install on.

maxtor has an excellent bit of cloning software called maxblast which with only a little input from the user does a good job.

files and settings transfer does an ok job but if your new pc has vista your old one has xp then you may have to download any updates to it for it to work ,merely run the prog and store the files on a external drive then run the prog on the new machine and show it where the files are

This post has been edited by chesters1: Jun 1 2009, 11:24 AM

i have an 80gb IDE and a 160gb SATA, i use the ide for all my games and i use the sata for storing all my videos, music just so if windows decides to die i still have all my stuff.

Thanks guys!