Hard drive thoughts-comparison

westy · Post by **westy** » Fri Aug 27, 2010 9:23 am

I ran out of SATA ports on my motherboard and need to make a decision-

I bought a new 2 TB Hitachi Deskstar (H3IK20003272SP 0S02861 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Data buffer 32 MB) hard drive and wanted to use it for storage but noticed that my OS is on a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3400620AS 400GB 7200 RPM SATA Cache 16MB hard drive.

I was going to take out one of my existing 1 TB storage drives and replace it with the new 2 TB one, but now I'm wondering if I wouldn't be better off partitioning the new 2 TB, copying my OS to that and taking out the 16 MB 400 GB Seagate drive.

Getting to the point- Is the 32 MB buffer on the new HD worth the hassle of copying the OS over in order to get the OS on the new 32 MB drive?

Any other thoughts or considerations?

Thanks in advance for you're input!

Sava700 · Post by **Sava700** » Fri Aug 27, 2010 9:43 am

Your wanting a drive for just the OS? I'd find a little raptor or something to put it on, use your others for storage since your wanting to boost seek time and the larger T drives used for just the OS is kinda a waste imo.

westy · Post by **westy** » Fri Aug 27, 2010 9:57 am

I bought the HD for storage, but then found out I don't have a spare SATA port. When I noticed that the OS HD was 16 MB, It got me thinking. I could leave the 400 GB 16 MB HD as is, and pull one of the 1 TB HD's I have and replace it with the 2 TB. (The 1 TB would go into my other box).

Question is- is it worth it to go through the hassle of transferring the OS and partitioning the 2 TB for the added cache of the HD.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Fri Aug 27, 2010 10:42 am

Depends what you do with it. There are other factors...sustained transfer rates, burst rates, seek times...I'd factor those in and I'd want the fastest drive for my OS.
Combined with other factors..which drive has the higher life expectancy (MTBF)...because that's also desirable for your OS.

Newegg had a great sale on Western Digital Black Edition 1TB drives...64 megs of cache, 5 year warranty...they were 85 bucks.

Performance helper....if you're running 2x physical hard drives...move your virtual memory (pagefile.sys) to the 2nd drive.

westy · Post by **westy** » Fri Aug 27, 2010 10:54 am

I'll have to check the fine print on the drives to compare the specs. From a longevity standpoint, I suppose the new drive would have more life left (for lack of a better term) than the old one......

westy · Post by **westy** » Sun Aug 29, 2010 10:57 am

While looking through my documentation today, I see there's a feature of the Asus P5Q-E called Drive Xpert. From what I can tell, it looks like I can connect another hard drive for storage this way. It notes:

Normal mode- This mode allows you to disable the Drive Xpert function and use the two SATA connections as the other onboard SATA connectors.

Anyone familiar with this feature?