What are the real-world benefits (on average) of this? Right now my system is a bit slower than most, but for security/stability reasons. (I work off an XP box, all data is on a Linux box on two drives arranged in RAID 1, which are backed up nightly to a remote NAS device, also RAID 1. All connections except the Linux backups are via Gigabit-capable ports.) In my next build, can I make a difference?
Given that all data is already off my main drive, I am free to spend spend spend on a single or pair of drives to run applications. But what kind of speed differences are possible? A thirty second difference in boot time? A minute difference? Apps (mostly Office and Adobe Design Suite programmes) don’t take more than five to fifteen seconds at most to load–could I really make a noticeable dent in those? I’m not talking about the difference between ~1998 hardware and today, but the difference between a run-of-the-mill Western Digital and one of their Raptor drives or a SSD. Or should I save myself the time (!) and not bother searching out the fastestest and bestestest HDD and go for basic hardware.
I imagine it’s less true than it used to be, but the disadvantage to 2 disks comes up if too many programs insist on storing data on the same drive as the application. In the early days of XP, I installed OS and apps on a smaller faster drive, and data on another. I found too many apps could not handle this, and the C: drive filled up too fast.
I don’t have the numbers quantified off hand (but they’re probably on storagereviews.com). I’ve had a raptor for 5 years now. When I first installed the raptor, the difference was remarkable - the raptor was way faster than even the high quality standard 7200 drives at the time. But as regular/higher end 7200 drives have become faster, the difference is not as noticible. It’s still noticible - my raptor is only 74gb and as applications have gotten bigger and bigger I’ve needed to store some apps on my big drive - it’s still clear which game is on the raptor and which isn’t - regular drives have closed the gap significantly.
I would imagine, with the significantly lower seek time, the raptor would show its difference even more in programs that require a lot of small loads, or due to fragmentation or for whatever reason require the seek head to work a lot.
The velociraptor (the newer version) is significantly faster, so perhaps it is today to 2009 7200 drives what the original was to 2004 7200 drives.
SSD I have no personal experience with, but I did read a review of the OCZ (I think) flagship drive which which put its numbers in “wow” territory - 250MB/s non-contiguous sustained reads IIRC (and effectively no seek times) which is way ahead of current disk based technology.
Are you sure about this? I see no reason this is technically infeasable, since you can have the drives reading different blocs of data at the same time, but when I was reading about doing a raid 1 setup years ago, I saw no mention that controllers or the standard were designed to take advantage of this.
Yes, windows will want to the stuff under documents and settings\user\local settings and \application data and such. And games will often store saved games there. And programs will often insist on cramming stuff on the C drive.
I made the mistake of making a 3gb C drive at one point (so that I could format the OS drive if needed without taking out anything else), thinking that would be more than enough for the OS, but eventually I had to repartition the drive because some programs refused to work if their files weren’t in a specific place on the C drive.
It depends on the controller, yes. And years ago not many took advantage. I believe the story is different now. So the OP should definitely check out reviews of the controllers available to him.
I have a 500gb HD that came with my computer and I put in two internal 1tb HD. I don’t notice any additonal noises and the computer runs just as it did with one internal HD.
I also have an external 1tb HD. (I use my computer to record TV shows, and if the show is HD, man that takes up space :))
You also have to make sure you get a proper fan. I put a bigger fan in my case when I got the drives so my cooling would be more efficent.
I semi-regularly replace my main drive with as they become full and the old drive is usually then put into service as my backup drive. I have a daily scheduled job to backup the primary drive to the secondary one (no special software needed, just windows backup and the built-in job scheduler).
RAID is OK but, statistically, data is lost more often due to fat fingers than hardware failure. RAID mirrors will happily delete a file from both drives when told to do so. A backup like mine maintains that other copy until it’s written over. That gives me a week, on average, until the file is deleted forever.
EDIT: the trouble with external drives switched on only when needed is that you have to remember to do it. Automation is, IMO, the only sure thing.
“For it is the doom of man that they forget.” - Merlin (Excalibur)
Unfortunately true. I’ve never had the drive that holds my OS fail, but a secondary hard drive failed on me. It took a long while and a lot of searching to find a program that actually followed through on the promise to pull things off a failed drive.