I know several people that have multiple hard drives on their PCs. Other than the brute memory/space factor, why have two? I know a few people that have their apps/games on one HD and have windows installed on a seperate, smaller one. Don’t most apps put common files in windows root directories as well? Incase of a HD failing, isn’t it going to interfere with apps in the other HD regardless? Lets say your windows install craters, so you re-install it. All those games/apps on the other drive aren’t going to work anymore anyhow, correct?
Redundancy. You can store critical data on both hard drives in case one goes belly up. (Not a foolproof backup scheme as you are not protected against theft or destruction of the whole machine, but better than nothing.)
Performance. Some architectures can either interleave data or access multiple hard drives simultaneously. This would be most important if you’re using virtual memory or performing some computation that uses a lot of swap space (e.g. editing enormous image files).
Convenience. Suppose you want a larger hard drive. How do you transfer the data from your old drive to your new drive? Unless you have a tiny amount of data, the easiest thing to do is install both hard drives and copy the old data. Having done that, why bother yanking the old one? (It’s also the case that Windows makes moving applications from one disk to another a fairly miserable experience. Keeping the old disk helps to avoid having to do this.)
bernse, to begin with, I’m not entirely sure you have understood the distinction between 2 partitions on a single physical hard disk, and 2 separate physical hard disks.
So I’ll cover both…
Case 1: Logically Separate Drives. A single physical hard disk can be divided into multiple logical drives called partitions (C:, D:, etc). This is done for various reasons. One of which is that on a very large hard disk, having more than one partition improves access speed of data on the disc (this is because the drive head has to move less distance to seek the data). Another reason is that it allows for a more organized structure (this is more a human consideration than a computer consideration). But one of the more important reasons is that in case of a failure, recovery is a whole lot easier if you indeed have atleast one other partition other than C:. Consider a case wherein your Windows directory is C:\Windows, and your games are installed on the D:\ drive. If Windows messes up, which it often does, it might be required for you to format C:. Now, if all your data was on C:\ only, you would have to first take a back up of everything, then format, then copy everything back. But, if you had most of your data on D:\ , all you would need to do is take a back up of the My Documents folder and few other files, while most of your data is intact on D:. If your games write to the registry in the C:\ drive, which most games do, then yes, you would need to reinstall the games anyways. But let’s say your game was installed on C:\ (which you need to format). Then you would first need to back up any saved games and levels that you might have reached in the game, reinstall, and re-copy all the saved games back into the games folders. You might have to do this for each game. However, if your games were installed on D:, all you would need to do would be to reinstall the game into the same directory as before and your saved games, levels, etc. would remain intact.
Additionally, additionally you can perform routine maintenance tasks (such as scandisk and defrag) on one partition while using the other. Searches for a particular file are also faster, assuming you know that all your games are on D:\ and you only search D:\ for a game.
Another extremely useful advantage of having separate logical drives is that you can have different OSes installed on the different partitions. So you can boot up into different versions of Windows and even Linux on the same computer.
Case 2: Separate Physical Hard Disks. If you meant “What are the advantages of 2 physically separate hard disks”, these are the reasons:
Having 2 Physically separate hard drives includes all the above mentioned benefits of different logical drives, along with further benefits that include:
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A physical failure of one of the hard disks will not affect the other hard disk. So you have a much greater chance of atleast one working hard disk. Even if you have to send one hard disk in for service or replacement, you can boot up using your other working hard disk.
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I often use my smaller hard disk as a huge floppy drive (not technically a floppy drive, just practically). This means that I can almost effortlessly copy upto 20GB of data on my hard disk and carry it to a friend’s place to use while leaving the other hard disk in my computer in case anyone wants to use the comp. while I’m gone.
When I upgraded to a 20 gig HD I left my 10 gig in so I now have 30 gigs of storage space. Simple as that.
I have four hard drives, adding up to 300Gb. I have so many critical projects on the go, that for a hard drive to die and everything to be lost with it would be an unmitigated disaster. But to lose a hard drive and only a quarter of my current projects to be lost, that’s much more manageable.
Laziness 
It was easier to just slave the HD from my old computer than to redownload or reinstall stuff I had on my own old computer.
If ya got Raid array, well you need more than one HD
These days you can use USB or firewire HD’s, so you can like have around 60 terabytes of space :-0
Well, my machine came with a 40 gigger, which wasn’t enough, so I threw in my old 60 gigger, for a grand total of a massive 100 gigs! Which means, incidentally, that I have a really big penis.
I have 4 partitions (actually 60:
C: 7.5 GB’s - main windows drive - OS and critical apps
D: 8 MB’s - the reason for this one is if I add a drive in the future It will (or had in the past) become my D: drive and bump my partitions below down one letter breaking links. When I add a second drive I delete this smallest possible partition. and just loose 8 megs
E: 22 GB’s - main data drive and program files (office and the like go here. THis setup also allows me to reinstall windows and save all my data
F: 2 GB’s - Swap file drive - I’ve heard that it increass performance to put the SF on it’s own partition
X1: I don’t know what it’sa called but its the old LINUX partition now abandoned
X2: Abandoned LINUX swap file X1 and X2 total 5 -15 GB’s - I forgot and am not in danger of running out of space.
“I have four hard drives, adding up to 300Gb. I have so many critical projects on the go, that for a hard drive to die and everything to be lost with it would be an unmitigated disaster. But to lose a hard drive and only a quarter of my current projects to be lost, that’s much more manageable.”
Everything else being equal, the chance of a hard drive failure in a machine with 4 hard drives is about 4 times the chance of a hard drive failure in a machine with one hard drive.
Er. Probably that’s not so, but even if it was, it still works out better for me.
With my laptop, I only have one HD (although it is partitioned, but that’s another subtopic), but my old desktop box has multiple physical hard drives. One day a few years back I heard the main bootable drive spin up, down, up, down, finally mounted on the Desktop, then generated a slew of error messages and then crashed. Held down Command-Option-Delete-Shift and booted from the other drive. It took me a couple tries to get them, but I copied all the important folders (email in and outboxes, work-in-progress folder off the Desktop, etc) to the other drive. Shut down, got on the phone with an 800 number vendor listed in the back of a catalog and ordered me a new drive, opened case, unplugged dying drive, and rebooted and kept working as if nothing had happened for the couple days before the new drive arrived. If I’d only had the one drive and it was dying, I could’ve booted from CDROM, but I could not burn a CDROM consisting of the files I wanted to rescue while booted from CD (although I could if I had two CDROM drives, I guess, but my machines don’t), and even if I could, it’s awfully hard to do any work booted from a CD.
From a rumor on the net, I went to Staples B&M yesterday to get a USB 2.0 External Maxtor 120 gig HD. There was only one in the case with no price on it & even a 40 gig one was $149.00 or so, but I got bold & asked the clerk to price check the big one, 120 gigs. Sure enough, it was $97.00 & comes with a $20 rebate (on the web)…
My Dell came with get this, 6 USB ports, I can just imagine the storage from them.
(PS: Yes, that really was $97.00)
GuanoLad,
The more “things” you have the greater your chances are that one of those “things” will break. That’s one of the reasons why RAID 0 can be such a disaster.
Here’s a site with more info. He’s talk about RAID but the concept also applies to multiple independant drives.
A multiple hard drive option that hasn’t been mentioned in this thread is PCI IDE cards. If your paltry onboard IDE connections are taken up by the pathetic maximum of four devices, don’t despair!
USB 2.0 hard drives are generally a bit more expensive than regular EIDE (not to mention the $50 you’ll have to pay for a USB 2.0 card if there isn’t one in your computer; most peoples’ computers still have 1.0 ports).
If you have a free PCI slot, an IDE card for it costs about $25 and allows you to add more hard drives or CD burners, DVD burners, etc. You can put 4 more devices on one PCI IDE card. They make ATA100 cards and even new ones supporting the ATA133 specification.
Right now my computer has four EIDE hard drives adding up to 360GB (320GB of which is 7200RPM), plus a CD/RW and a DVD-ROM. Everything runs great, and when copying files from drive to drive, I can’t even tell by the speed of the transfer which drive is on the motherboard’s adapter, and which is on the PCI card.
This is an economical solution if you need a lot of storage space, as the price curve goes up drastically when you start shopping for the newer, high-capacity drives. A cheap Western Digital 120GB drive will only run you about $130. A 160GB drive by the same manufacturer costs a whopping $240.
Oh, and I should also mention that, putting aside theoretical maximum data transfer rates, USB drives tend to be much slower than their EIDE counterparts. Also, you don’t have to buy a USB 2.0 card for your drive; 2.0 is backwards compatible with the old cards. Your drive will just be a hell of a lot slower than the slow drive it already was.
The only advantages to a USB 2.0 drive that I can see would be increased portability and the fact that they don’t have to take up any precious physical space inside the tower. Well, I guess hot swapping is pretty cool, too.
I dual-boot, XP on my main drive, one partition (13 megs… so I guess my penis is smaller than Smeghead’s, which must make him a monster…) my second drive has Win98.
neutron star, the box says it works with usb 1.0 too…
neutron star, the box says it works with usb 1.0 too…
It seems that each person has a different reason…
Here’s mine: speed.
I regularly run processing tasks on multi-gigabyte video files. If you try to process a gigantic file from C: to C:, the disk heads will be thrashing quite a bit while going between the source and destination cylinders.
Now, if you have two identical drives, you can easily bounce your video or whatever between the two drives in a fraction of the time. On a side note, when I bought my second drive, I decided against paying for a faster speed since the transfer rate was going to be limited to the slower of the two drives anyway.