HDD help: Partition or Second disk

Hello,

Recently I have been running into some serious problems with my HDD becase it is loaded to the brim (all 250gb) wiht programs and files, but it is not partitioned. So this basically boils down to it running as fast as a 2 legged tortoise.

So I've decided to clean up this mess with a second drive. I need some advice though, should I go for a 36gb raptor and load up just windows and necessary progs on it? Then use my current 250 for storage and music and games (partitioned of course).

Or should I opt for another 250gb and just loop both drives so windows reads them as one big 500gb drive and partition the whole thing into: Windows, music, videos, games, etc...

What do you guys suggest?

Thanks!

Guessing they are SATA and you were thinking of RAID 0 ??

I'd go for option A personally, if you back up what you need from the 250gb drive to DVD's, and then put Windows on a partition on the Raptor, along with a decent pagefile on a seperate partition, and then programs seperately. Then you have some space freed up on the 250gb drive, the risk of losing everything using RAID 0 is too big IMO, plus you would see a difference using the Raptor.(But so will your wallet :rolleyes: )


Liam

Good to hear from you again liam!

Btw, I was actually did not have RAID 0 in mind. I was under the impression that you can simply make 2 physical drives combine into one virtual drive under windows without utilizing RAID. I was thinking more along the lines of just starting fresh and reformatting my 250gb (backing up appropriate data of course), then reinstalling windows and partioning as necessary.

I was just wondering which is a better tradoff: having a seperate harddrive for the OS, pagefile, etc (the raptor 36gb) and use my current 250gb (partitioned after reformatting) for games, movies, etc. OR get another 250gb and install windows on that with its own partition and loop my other harddrive (no RAID) to have essentially 2 partitioned HDDs. The latter is a plus because i'd have 500gb to work with, but both would be 7000RPM, whereas the OS on the raptor would have less space, but 10.000 RPM.

I hope thats not too confusing!

Oh i see, i thought you meant when RAID 0 reads the drive as one, i think you would benefit from the extra space, if you set up partitions on both drives, and also backed up some from the old 250gb drive, and then performing a defrag would probably help things, and the price difference per gigabyte would be good, and you could then get a Raptor at some point in the future just for Windows, which would speed things up further.(10,000rpm Vs. 7200rpm) Does your mobo support SATA II?? You could also benefit from the speed of SATA II compared to IDE/SATA, and most SATA II drives also have a 16mb cache.


Liam

My MB does support 3gbs Sata,which is what I am using currently (WD 250bg, sataII, 16mb cache).

So basically my optiosn were gett a really fast Raptor for just the OS and give up another 250gb...or get another 250gb (SataII, 16mb) and give up a really fast Raptor.

If I understand you correctly I should probably just get another 250 and partition the two drives. Liam, do you think partitioning the OS on a 250 will really get things slick again? Becuase my original HD is not partitioned, whcih is why I need to get another HD!

You can merge two disks into one big partition by using Dynamic Disks. I would advise against it though - there is a risk of it all going horribly wrong and you losing all your data :eek:

How to Convert Basic and Dynamic Disks

Unless you have a screamingly fast PC, the performance benefits of Raptor drives are not that great IMO. I think you'd be better off with another 250GB drive (which is the size that currently offers the best bang for the buck at the moment). Then keep all your important stuff on the new drive, separate from Windows, so if you ever have to reinstall all your data is unaffected.

Thanks for the response SS,

So i suppose I'll just keep the drives seperate than, have windows read 2x250gb.

Hopefully all goes well...I'll order an HD hopefully by the end of the day

Keep an eye on the SMART data for your array. Now that you've got one drive that's older than the other it's likely to fail before the other. Your 2x16MB cache should make the raid config pretty powerful for the price, though.