Dual Hard Drives

Sorry if this is a noob question. I currently have one 80gig Maxtor hard drive on my PC. I was wondering if it would be beneficial to get a larger drive and just have my OS (XP) on my old drive. I noticed that many newer systems come like this. Will the computer run faster with separate drives? Also if anyone could point me to some kinf of tutorial about this it would be much appreciated. Thanks.

If you have your OS and Programs on one physical drive, and your data on another, both disks can be used at the same time. Your OS/Apps disk for loading things from the hard disk into RAM, whilst transferring data to and from your data disk at the same time.

If you're going to do this, remember to put the second disk on a seperate channel on the motherboard.

If you motherboard supports RAID, you may consider using it. The levels of RAID usually supported by Desktop motherboards are:

RAID 0 - Striping, data is written to and read from both disks simultaneously, which makes them perform very, very fast. The down side is if one of your drives fails, you lose all of your data. Requires 2 or more disks, and they usually have to be the same size but not always.

RAID 1 - Data is "mirrored" onto a second disk. This means that if one physical drive fails, you still have all of your data on the other one. The read speed of the data doubles because the computer can read from both disks at the same time, but writes are the same speed as one disk. RAID1 would double the price of your existing capacity, but if one disk dies and you don't have a backup you won't lost anything.

RAID5 - The best of both worlds. RAID5 requires 3 or more disks that usually have to be the same size. One of the disks if used for parity if you experience a failure - so you get the total capacity of 2 disks out of 3 (or the total number of disks, minus 1 for parity). With a good RAID controller, a RAID 5 array can be very fast AND redundant.

RAID 6, 10 etc and all the other RAID levels don't really have many applications on desktops or workstations, and are the domain of dedicated servers only.

Thanks for the help. Ill do some research.

Also, it is beneficial to have your operating system and programs on one drive and all your personal data, music, and movies on a separate drive. This way if something happens to the main drive you don't lose data. Make sure to have the drives on separate channels if you can.

If you can afford it...get two identical drives and setup a raid system like OZ recommended.

Then keep your old hard drive as a pics/documents/etc external back up drive.

I almost lost a ton of stuff to a hard drive failure so now I keep DVD backups and external hard drive backups at a family member's house just in case.