2 HDD's OR 1

ME&ME&ME

Is it better to have 2 med HDD's or 1 big one,and why?

Blub2k4

ME&ME&ME wrote:

Is it better to have 2 med HDD's or 1 big one,and why?

What is to be the use of said drive/drives? Without knowing the purpose there is no "correct" answer to this question.

leeroybrown

As Blub2k4 says, it's impossible to answer your question properly without knowing more about your situation.

What I will say is that normally you'll knotice a 'price point' in the HDD market where the Gb/€ ratio is best. Those are obviously the drives to consider first as they give the best value for money. Two (IDE) 160Gb drives at ~€90 each will be better value than one 300Gb drive at €230. Also, having two hard drives has the obvious advantage that you'll lose less data to a HDD failure.

Naturally there are situations where you might want/need one big drive, such as a small form factor case, shortage of drive bays, shortage of IDE channels ...

leeroybrown

Nukem wrote:

NO NO.Just a general question. You see on the Signatures the spec of other peoples comps and was wondering in general is better to have 2 or 1.Gaming would be the main reason :rolleyes:

I see what you mean now. You see quite a few people with (Raptor) RAID0 setups and they're slightly faster for loading times, startup, etc, but are overkill unless you actually need the speed increase for video editing or something. From the point of view of gaming, if you have a decent PC with enough RAM it woudn't matter what hard drive setup you have as HDD access during the game itself is minimal. Most people just have extra hard drives for storage.

Blub2k4

Nukem wrote:

NO NO.Just a general question. You see on the Signatures the spec of other peoples comps and was wondering in general is better to have 2 or 1.Gaming would be the main reason :rolleyes:

The question does not make sense on that basis, technically, after all it is a technical forum, there is no basis in the question to give an answer.
If you want a flash sig and bragging rights on your rig then two may be better, if it is for gaming then your advantages are coming from High horsepower CPU, gfx card and lots of ram and Hard drives will play little to no role in the performance of the machine, within reason.
As the bad bad leeroy says there is the price factor to consider sometimes.
If you were editing video or needed higher security or something specific then two hard drives could be advisable.

Anyway Nukem, how do you know his motivation for asking the question?

ME&ME&ME

Rockin .Just had to ask,caus i didnt know. Thanks for clearing that up guys.

Blub2k4

Err where is the post from Nukem gone?

ME&ME&ME

Blub2k4 wrote:

The question does not make sense on that basis, technically, after all it is a technical forum, there is no basis in the question to give an answer.
If you want a flash sig and bragging rights on your rig then two may be better, if it is for gaming then your advantages are coming from High horsepower CPU, gfx card and lots of ram and Hard drives will play little to no role in the performance of the machine, within reason.
As the bad bad leeroy says there is the price factor to consider sometimes.
If you were editing video or needed higher security or something specific then two hard drives could be advisable.

Anyway Nukem, how do you know his motivation for asking the question?

Caus its the same person.I is in work and some comps will only let me in under certains names at times. i dunno.Comp hopping at the mo

ME&ME&ME

Blub2k4 wrote:

Err where is the post from Nukem gone?

i deleted it so it wouldn caus confusion,when i was in the other room

Too late

Blub2k4

ah ok fair enough, you probably need to clear cookies in the machine to stop the automatic logins, anyway that is another thread. Good luck.

ME&ME&ME

So better to have 2 HDD's instead of partinioning a big one or am i just fe*king about then.

AS in 40 GB + 80 GB

OR

160 GB

Blub2k4

ME&ME&ME wrote:

So better to have 2 HDD's instead of partinioning a big one or am i just fe*king about then.

AS in 40 GB + 80 GB

OR

160 GB

Well if you are going with the 40+80gb that will give you a combined 80GB in a raid array as you will lose 40gb of the 80gb drive as it will not be used in raid0.
Get a 40+40 and raid them instead that will give you the same result in raid0 as the 40+80.
Of course if you dont want to raid them then you have a combined 120gb with two drives but no performance increase at all, unless you count the moved swap file and improved swapping as that will bring a bit.
As you have the choices above I would go with the one 160gb drive and partition it as that would do you and you have greater space.

ME&ME&ME

Blub2k4 wrote:

Well if you are going with the 40+80gb that will give you a combined 80GB in a raid array as you will lose 40gb of the 80gb drive as it will not be used in raid0.
Get a 40+40 and raid them instead that will give you the same result in raid0 as the 40+80.
Of course if you dont want to raid them then you have a combined 120gb with two drives but no performance increase at all, unless you count the moved swap file and improved swapping as that will bring a bit.
As you have the choices above I would go with the one 160gb drive and partition it as that would do you and you have greater space.

Cheers. Think il just partion them and sure i can always mess about later on if needs be

Inspector Gadget

One potentially useful nugget of information that hasn't cropped up in this thread yet is the fact that you need a modern IDE controller (either certain later ATA-100's, or virtually any ATA-133 variety) to be able to make use of drives larger than 137GB (such as the 160GB you mentioned, ME&ME(...). Be advised that some older systems may need either a BIOS update (or a new controller board) to be able to make full use of drives of that size.

I'm assuming you're building a new machine for gaming, but on the offchance, I thought I'd mention it...
Gadget

maxheadroom

Inspector Gadget wrote:

One potentially useful nugget of information that hasn't cropped up in this thread yet is the fact that you need a modern IDE controller (either certain later ATA-100's, or virtually any ATA-133 variety) to be able to make use of drives larger than 137GB (such as the 160GB you mentioned, ME&ME(...). Be advised that some older systems may need either a BIOS update (or a new controller board) to be able to make full use of drives of that size.

I'm assuming you're building a new machine for gaming, but on the offchance, I thought I'd mention it...
Gadget

Actually, I was looking into this the other day, and if you get a seagate drive, their discwizard softare can write the boot code into the drive if your bios isn't 48bit LBA compatible. I'm not sure about other manufacturers, seagate specifically mention this on their website though.

Nukem

aka (ME&ME&ME)

Building a new system but thanx for the advice all advice is good

tba

I dont know about the rest of the people here but I always have a smaller drive slaved to a larger one on which I store a copy of all my files. Not for speed purposes or anything like that, just an easily accessable drive that wont go bang if windows is bad.

Its important for me as I create alot of files that are referenced as I work (ie used in the file I have open) and they could be edited in fifty small ways every day, and you know that it will all go wrong 1 minute before the backup.

Col_Loki

With two hard drives theres also more noise and more heat, might not matter in your system just thought id mention it.

Also if your board only supports IDE drives you might want to go for 1 big drive as going over 2 will most lightly mean getting a PCI controller card.......

Also a 40gb and an 80gb is going to work out more expensive than say a 160gb drive.........

pyrogenx

still though depending how much and how important the data you want to store is. say if its not big files and important you should definatly get 2 HD's. that way if u loose one u still have the other half.

Superman

i live life on the edge! nerd style!!

1 x 160gb s-ata!!

oooh!

Nukem

Think il go for the 160Gb as the files aint gonna be that important id say.Only college :rolleyes:

Thanx for all the help

pyrogenx

Nukem wrote:

Think il go for the 160Gb as the files aint gonna be that important id say.Only college :rolleyes:

lol