internal hard drive advise...

danmon_81

danmon_81

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Hi all....

My Hard Drive is 3/4 full and i have some amazon vouchers so i'd like an additional Internal Hard drive...not sure about set up etc...Raid etc....any advise would be great:

Current System:
Dell Inspirion 531
Vista (32bit)
AMD athlon 64 X2 dual processor (2.61GHz)
2.00 RAM
1TB Samsung ext hard drive

not really got much of a clue...would like 1tb, 7200rpm at least.
 
If you don't have a clue I wouldn't bother. I know about RAID and I still don't bother

Basically Raid 0 is when 2x1TB drives are put together to show up as one 2TB drive. Data is split between them so both drives are accessed at the same time increasing your speed. The problem with this is that if one drive fails you lose half your data, and that doesn't mean half your files, it means half OF your files. So it all corrupts.

Raid 1 is no good to you because that means Drive 2 is a clone of Drive 1 and Raid 1 is a safety feature giving you a clone of your drive. Raid 0+1 requires 4 drives and is a mix of the top two. Just buy another drive and bung it in :)
 
either way, whichever you want.. youll need to check and see if your motherboard has a spare sata port to run 2 at the same time (a quick google looks like it may have 4 ports?).

desktop hard drives are 99% of the time 3.5" (again a quick google looks like it has a spare 3.5" bay).
 
I have to say I think a couple of decent HDs in RAID 0 is pretty fast and certainly worth doing for the extra speed (£45 for a 1TB Samsung F3 so 2 would be £90 - I'd only ever pair drives in a RAID0 array). Assuming you have the infrastructure for regular full system backups of course...

In fact, my latest computer build is the first one I've built that doesn't have a RAID system disk...
 
danmon_81 said:
Is it easy to run them side by side? Is there any benefit?
Click to expand...
2 disks? Yes, you get a C: drive and another drive... Any benefit of what? (BTW, if you're asking about the benefits of RAID, then RAID probably isn't for you...)
 
Yes - you get more space and if you share the workload out across the two drives (e.g. point Photoshop at the one with the least use as scratch disks) you should see an improvement in speed (not sure how much, your PC will be holding you back if you're doing anything heavily computational...).
 
arad85 said:
I have to say I think a couple of decent HDs in RAID 0 is pretty fast and certainly worth doing for the extra speed (£45 for a 1TB Samsung F3 so 2 would be £90 - I'd only ever pair drives in a RAID0 array). Assuming you have the infrastructure for regular full system backups of course...

In fact, my latest computer build is the first one I've built that doesn't have a RAID system disk...
Click to expand...

i used to have a bookmark of a raid0 raptors vs a single raptor benchmark, there is surprisingly little in it for most jobs.
 
I'd suggest replacing your existing hard drive with the new one and doing a fresh install. Windows slows down over time and starting from scratch brings the speed back that it used to have.

It also means that if you are having problems you can just switch it off swap the old drive back in and be back where you were.

Use windows easy transfer and your backup drive to get your files off the old drive and later onto the new one once windows is reinstalled.

When you are sure everything is working how you want you can use the old drive as a second drive in the computer, just keep it in a drawer or wipe it and sell it.
 
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