Multiple hard drives

**jdiazj1** · 03-17-2006, 10:38 AM

Hello, my system i decided to go with a 300gig 3.5" 7500rpm hd. I want to put a hell of a lot of media in there. one of my friends told me that i was going to be using one hard drive, that there might be a slowing of response. since its trying to access all the media and me running the frontend and so on, he recommended me running 2 HDs, 1 for the software and one for the media. Is this correct? does anybody have any insight on this. I have an old 40gig 2.5 laptop hard drive. i was planning on using the 40 gig for the OS and daisy chain it to the 300 gig. I was going to be using

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and i want to use this

How can i use this adapter with this ide cable with they are both females. Is there any ide flat cable gender changer? thanks

**GreenBeast** · 03-17-2006, 11:20 AM

you could just partition the 300gig in to one little partition(10 or 20gig) for OS/software and whatever is left into a big media partition

**Mobtown** · 03-17-2006, 11:26 AM

you could just partition the 300gig in to one little partition

I have taken it a step further and partitioned my media drive into about 18 seperate logical drives. With somewhere near 40k mp3s it was taking forever for indexing to complete and my libraries to load. Having all the media organized on seperate logical partitions has helped tremedssly.

**jdiazj1** · 03-17-2006, 11:52 AM

Hmm, interesting, I never really thought about that. So i could partition it like, lets say, 20 gigs for software, 100 gig for mp3, and i guess the rest video. So this might work huh? so hooking up my 40 gig 2.5" hd isnt necessary

**TheLandYacht** · 03-18-2006, 02:40 PM

Keep in mind that for indexing & stuff that'll help. For physically accessing the data, partitioning won't be enough. No matter how many partitions you have on the drive, it still only has one read/write head.

**Stealth97** · 03-18-2006, 06:42 PM

I think the best way to go is a 20-40 gb for your OS, and applications, and then a removable HD for Media, which you can easily take into the house.

That being said, I have a 120gig drive with 20g for apps and OS and 100 gig for media, and no complaints.

**jdiazj1** · 03-18-2006, 06:49 PM

Thank you for ur replies. I think im just going to keep it the way i originally thought of then. with the 40 gig 2.5" for OS and appz and the 300 3.5" with multiple partitions for media. Maybe ill partition it like 3 or 4 times for music, videos, pics and whatever else. thanks

**DaveB** · 03-18-2006, 07:20 PM

Originally Posted by GreenBeast

you could just partition the 300gig in to one little partition(10 or 20gig) for OS/software and whatever is left into a big media partition

That won't do it.

When it comes to hard drives it helps to think about how they work. The platters inside are spinning and the head has to move in towards the center of the platter, and back out, in order to locate the head over the data (cylinder) that it needs to read.

The speed increase from having multiple drives is because you have multiple heads seeking data and simultaneous data transfer occuring between the two drives. This eliminates some contention and thrashing.

**Splash-X** · 03-21-2006, 10:34 AM

The best way to speed up a set of two hard drives is to use a Raid0 array. This is striping. For this to work you would need to identical hard drives size wise. What happens is data is split between each drive like stripes on a shirt, equally divided, one here one there.

Raid0 allows for faster file access because two drives are pulling the data. The down side? In a two drive system if either of these drives becomes corrupt you whole install is wasted.

In Raid0 you can add as many hard drives as your board can support. If you use three or more drives you can rebuild a lost/damaged drive off parity (spelling?).

3 x 80GB hard drives is 240GB of storage. 3x 40gb is 120GB.