Getting the Most Out of Two Hard Drives.

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Jiarn

I recently canablized my second computer for it's hard drive and now I have two in my main system. I've heard of ways to speed up certain things (like gaming) and what not by doing something to them but I don't have the foggiest idea how or what?
 
Questions:
-Are the drives the same size?
-Are they the same spindle speed?
-Are they the same type? (IDE/SATA)
-Do you have enough bays in your computer to mount all the drives?
-What OS are you using?
-How are the drives partitioned/formatted?

--Patrick
 
J

Jiarn

Different sizes. One is 300gb and is a Raptor 10,000 drive. The other is a 150gb 7500 regular drive. Both are SATA, both are in the computer and "installed" already. I'm on Windows 7.

Not sure about the partiions and formatting though.
 
Simplest solution is to make the Raptor your boot drive and the other one into a place to put the stuff you rarely access (and also your swap file) to keep space free on your boot drive (disk access gets a little faster if the swap file is not on the boot drive).

If you want to optimize things a little more, you can partition the Raptor in half (150a+150b), install the OS and apps onto the outermost partition (where the disk is faster) and copy your infrequently used stuff to the other partition, then occasionally copy/clone the second partition over to the other drive (150c) while remembering to leave enough room there on that other drive for the swap file.

If you want to mess around with Dynamic Disks, you can slice up your disk partitions and either stripe them (RAID 0) for speed or mirror them (RAID 1) for reliabilty. There are some trade-offs, of course.

If your motherboard is made by Intel, you may have something similar to the above but hardware-based called Matrix Storage, which could allow you to stripe part of your disks while mirroring another part.

Failing everything else, your motherboard may have the ability to create a basic RAID0 of 150+150 (really 300+150, but it will auto-shrink the larger to match the smaller) ie total of 300GB drive that runs twice as fast (but is more prone to failure...remember to back up!), or you could go for a basic 150GB RAID1 which is significantly more reliable though not generally much faster (unless the controller is capable of striping reads. Most aren't).

Anyone think of any other configuration to try?

--Patrick
 
C

Chibibar

I personally never try raiding two different speed drive. Mirror would be best since it duplicate the image and good recovery, but striping it (make it 300gb) could be unstable since they are two different speed (again, this is what I was told back in school, but never really put into application. I ALWAYS use same speed drives when striping and non-mirror raid)

One of my network buddy told me if you REALLY want to boost it, you could make a small partition (30GB) of 10k drive for OS only and the rest for apps (120GB give or take) and use the 150gb (7.5k drive) mirror the OS as backup and then make the rest of the 10k drive 150gb into 3rd partition for just data or alternative backup (it is good to have multiple) I know it is "insane" multiple back up BUT at least your OS partition is mirror/backup on your 2nd drive and so is your main 120gb of app space.

Depending on your motherboard, you may already have the hardware raid capability which will auto detect your drive and give you option on what you can do :) I have Asus X58 P6Tmotherboard (yea it is old now) and it is pretty awesome. I did raid 5 with 4 drives (same speed and size) and made it into 2 partition on the controller side.
 
J

Jiarn

My head kind of ass-ploded trying to keep up with most of it.

The thoughts do intrigue me though.
 
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