2 hardrives versus 1 big one

[D'lane]

What are the pros and cons to choosing two 40 gb hard drives over having one
80 gb hard drive?

[rond36]

Pros
2 40GB drives can hold almost as much data as one 80GB drive.
You can put an image of one drive on the other one in case one fails.
You can have one for important stuff and one for meaningless junk


cons
Uses two drive bays and IDE channels.
You may want to add another drive later
you might not have an IDE channel available to add another drive and have to install an IDE controller card (which adds to your boot time considerably)


[This message has been edited by rond36 (edited 10-25-2001).]

[This message has been edited by rond36 (edited 10-25-2001).]

[This message has been edited by rond36 (edited 10-25-2001).]

[kdoye]

http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif I would just grab the huge one and make sure you take care of it. Keep it organized and you will be fine. That drive is HUGE!!!

What are planning on doing with it?

Kev

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Hope everyone is well during these trying times

[BigBlue66]

Hey,

If it were my choice, I would go with two smaller ones, assuming that I had plenty of IDE channels to choose from. That way, I could put the swap file on a completely different drive. And, as mentioned already, it comes in handy for ghosting/imaging.

Cheers,

Big Blue 66


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Life = Karma, or is it, Karma = Life?

[Jixxer]

You gotta keep in mind that it would take much longer to defragment an 80GB hard drive than a 40GB. Of course you could always partition the 80GB to smaller ones so that you could maintain the way you organize your files. I have two 20GB drives and partition them so that my OS is in its own partition and everything else is kept separate so in case you have to format your hard drive, all you have to do is format the OS partition so everything else is kept safe and without having to backup everything into CDs. Also, I kept a small partition just for downloading files so that my antivirus can check the file before I view it. I named the partition "Quarantine", if you know what I mean. It takes a chunck out of waiting for a thorough scan of hard drives for any errors (that's if you go for the multiple small partitions).

Just a suggestion.

[D'lane]

Thanx guys for your information. I was working on an assignment where i had free reign to build a computer to a customer's specs. It required a lot of hard drive space and i couldn't decide whether it would be to the customer's benefit to have two smaller ones or one bigger one. As it turned out, I figured he required 120 gb.. i know *rolls her eyes* and that I could only get that with a SCSI which upped the price considerably. So i opted for 1 40 gb and 1 80 gb.. with the partitioning idea one of you suggested anyway. As it turned out i received an 8/9 on the assignment. *grins happily*
Thanks to you all for your input.
D.

[iisbob]

Actually most harddrive vendors are now making 100GB> IDE drives now ( for around $225-$300 ) so it is no longer necessary to go with SCSI.

Thank GOD. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/rolleyes.gif

And with the soon to debute new Serial ATA standards we'll start to see sppeeds and data transfer rates that equal or surpass even Ultra SCSI180 specs, without the headaches of ID assignments and terminators.

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iisbob
"Bachelors should be heavily taxed. It's not fair that some men should be happier than others."
-- Oscar Wilde