Advantages of a 2 hard drive set up

[vilasman]

Can someone explain the advantages of having two hard drives in a computer, with one primarily containing the operating system? I am going to do it...I have an ultra bay hard drive adapter on the way. I have the drive that came with the computer and a 500Gb drive. I am debating getting like a 200 or 320G for the operating system and putting the 500Gb in the ultra bay. But I want to understand why I am doing it.

[richk]

I'll answer your question first, than tell you why I think it is the wrong question for your setup. On a desktop machine, all the OS related I/Os can occur on one drive so that the frequent arm-movement from reading small system files and from paging doesn't interfere with data transfers occuring on a different drive. On your thinkpad, the Ultrabay is a PATA device, and your 500GB drive is probably going to be a SATA device. The SATA Ultrabay adapter on T6x machines contains a PATA->SATA bridge circuit that adds overhead, so I doubt you will see any benefit and I expect it will likely be slower. Others may have different ideas.

[Puppy]

Can someone explain the advantages of having two hard drives in a computer, with one primarily containing the operating system?

I don't think there is any advantage. Two physical hard drives might be useful if the Windows page file or a virtual machine virtual drive is on separated hard drive to improve overall performance but that's all. More important is to have full image backup of the drive on an external drive in case of hard drive failure or any kind of damage though. Acronis TrueImage is your friend here.

[lstratos]

I only use it as more storage.. I have ssd on main drive, and a slave drive for data storage...

[vilasman]

I have acronis... it is truly a friend in the time of need... I think the main reason i wanted to do is... I tend to mess up my computer with viruses and installing and uninstalling software and all manner of other craziness...
I was thinking that if i did a 2 hd system and put the operating system on one and all my movies and other assorted media on the big drive. I was also going to partition the operating system drive and do win xp on one side and maybe ubuntu on the other...
Is the ultra bay drive going to be to slow to watch a movie from?

[EOMtp]

Can someone explain the advantages of having two hard drives in a computer, with one primarily containing the operating system?

Right idea, wrong approach! Yes, for numerous reasons, it is most advisable to segregate the operating system and programs from data. However, two physical drives is not the optimal way to accomplish that segregation, especially if one of the drives will be in the UltraBay (see richk's comment above). The correct implementation is to partition the primary physical drive into multiple logical drives, with C: containing only the operating system and application programs ... and none of your data nor any data created by application programs.

The only reasons for a laptop to use a second physical drive are that one needs more disk space or one wants safety from the failure of one of the drives.

[FrankK-F]

Allow me a different vantage point.

When I migrated to my W500, I soon upgraded to W7/64, and under it an X86 Virtual Machine for 32 bit apps. In migrating my apps a few were clean installs to 64 bit, some installed both 32 and 64 bit versions, others remain only 32 bit but run well under X86 ... and still others wont, but are important to my work. So while I moved forward I could not let go of my prior generation of WXP/32 machines. I needed a means of operating among them and keep my data management rational and reasonably simple.

My maxed-out A31p's are 3 spindle machines and I got to appreciate that HW configuration for practical reasons.

On my A31p's I partitioned the primary HDD into 3 drives ... OpSys, virtual-memory, and my applications; this worked generally as intended, except some apps did not give me a choice, and my VM would reset to default (C-Drv) from time to time. My 2nd HDD had my data files. Having had 2 A31p's this enabled me to take my data drive and use it in one or the other machine and various docking station setups. (A second identical machine also gives redundancy for uninterrupted availability in case of HW service needs.)

Today my primary machine is the W500 with a 256GB SSD as my primary drive with W7/64 and X86 VM under it for 32bit apps ... and partitioned the same as above. I use my Ultrabay for an optical drive.

Now for my data ... I have a RAID-1 in my ExpressCard/54 slot with a pair of 32GB 266X CF cards. This strategy allows me to move my data drive among my current machines .. the W500 and my A31p setups with different Dock-II setups (on the A31p's I have a PCCard Adapter for CF Card). I should mention that this ALL-solid-state setup on the W500 is markedly faster than any of my HDD systems .. both, at boot-up and read/write ops ... but noticeable only with larger data files like Photoshop, CAD, 10-15MB spreadsheets, and the like. (My system now takes about 65 seconds to Boot ... back in the late 80's I had an HP laptop with a 16bit 8MHz CPU ... all solid state (with DOS2.2) that did a reboot in about 1.1 seconds upon a 3-finger salute.)

The essence is that I implemented the "3-spindle system" on my W500 and have gained the flexibility to jump among my 3 ThinkPad machines.

Of course since my internal data space is now 32GB .. not 320GB, I had to rethink my data into "current and essential"... and archived external libraries.

With 64GB CF cards now coming down in price I might upgrade. But then I wonder how soon 128GB CF cards will come along.

[EOMtp]

Allow me a different vantage point.

Excellent presentation! Thank you ... (You are 3 sigma removed from the mean in technical sophistication, requirements, and implementation. My earlier comments went out only 2 sigma.)

[eyestrain]

Yeah, neat stuff Frank.

I think there would be a speed gain from OP's two drives. OS, and maybe apps on main drive. App data, possibly apps themselves, on the ultrabay drive. Both drives can be accessed at the same time, or about the same time, and access times should be improved. Pata isn't so bad.

I keep all of my data (and I do mean ALL, essentially) on a NAS. Makes it easier to work from multiple computers. Will eventually move firefox bookmarks there too.

When my final setup is done, which I've been meaning to get done for a few years now, cache will all be in ram, ALL data will be on NAS, and either I'll be using Linux read-only from CF in the Ultrabay, or if Windows, then: OS will be on CF, and Apps will either be on the same CF or another CF. Or will use RAID 0 on computers that allow 2 CFs to be accessed in a way that offers a speed benefit in RAID. I'm generally talking about 2gb CF's here, with XP & nlite, compressed. Linux 1gb, the other half empty, or room for more apps.

[vilasman]

Thanks for that last set of information... I dont need to have a fast computer all i do is surf and watch movies... my wife is a graphic artist... creative suite but she is a wanna be mac head.
I just want to have a bloody screaming fast computer. I have dreams of having or making a multi core processor laptop.

Is a CF card that much faster than an SSD?

[eyestrain]

oh, it's slower than real ssd.

But cheaper. Was lots lots cheaper, now...
With two computers, and only one boot each, I'd just do real SSD instead.

[EOMtp]

Is a CF card that much faster than an SSD?

As stated above, quite the contrary. A CF card will operate at best circa 25Mbps, whereas a 7200RPM hard drive will yield 50-75Mbps, and an SSD will yield 150-200+Mbps.

In your original posting you note the hard drive capacities, but state nothing of their rotational speeds, and you discuss how you might use them without noting their respective RPMs. This leads me to think that you may not be aware that the single most noticeable speed boost for a computer with adequate memory (RAM) comes from increasing the speed of the hard drive on which the operating system resides. A change from 5400RPM to 7200RPM offers a palpable speed boost, and going to an SSD is doubly so. If you want speed, then, at the very least, make certain that your operating system and swap file "live" on a 7200RPM hard drive.

[vilasman]

I guess i am search for a SSD or a 7200rpm drive then... again thanks for the advice

[eyestrain]

Magnetic hard drives are very good at sequential read and write speeds. They are poor to mediocre at random reads and writes, such as when booting up (random read) or when writing to many already existing small files (random write).

The newest SSDs are very good at sequential read and write. They are good at random read and write.

CF cards are fair at sequential read speeds, and often half that speed on sequential writing. (25mb isn't really the best tho, I do have some that read over 40mb/sec., and newer ones are better.) They are good at random read. They are poor at random write. Sometimes, random writes can be slow enough to make the computer stutter or stop, so you need to be very careful with os settings if using CF (or older ssd). My goal is no writing allowed at all with linux, not to preserve the card, but for speed.

Generally, magnetic hard drives are Much, Much slower than ssd or cf on random reads. It's the access time that is so much quicker with a chip than a platter.

Get a newer ssd, and you get decent random writes and you're set all around, not much tweaking needed, except for accommodating a smaller drive size. Put most data on a NAS or on a separate magnetic drive in ultrabay.

Gigabit nas boxes aren't too slow. slower than options above, but not so bad as one might think. For data anyway, I never tried booting off a network. Actually, might be nice, with a small os, lots of ram, and storing entire os in ram.

[vilasman]

So... another question.... I have a 500Gb 5400rpm drive. I am considering doing one of the following 2 things.
1. Getting a 80-120G or smaller, 7200 rpm drive... making it the boot drive and storing everything else in the 5400rpm 500G in the ultra bay. I would partitioin this drive into 3 parts... main boot, recovery boot and a linux install
2. Partitioning the 5400rpm 500G as listed above and using the free space for data, until I can get a 500G or bigger 7200 rpm drive and then cloning the present drive to it, formatting the present drive and using it for data.

I can't afford an SSD for the moment but I am guessing that the optimal set up would be to buy a 100G or so SSD use it for the boot,recovery,linux drive and then put my current 500G into the ultra bay

[EOMtp]

Perhaps you do not need to proceed incrementally. The Hitachi 7K500 (500GB, 7200RPM) -- fast, quiet, cool-running, low power, simply perfect! -- costs $95.00.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822145275

[vilasman]

Thank you for the tip