HDD Query

[snakenobi]

I am buying a 3tb HDD

people around the net have an opinion to buy 1 but 2 HDD with 1-2tb of space



I want to know why is that?

1)Are they talking about RAID and data being split and written on 2 drives?

2)Does SATA transfer from two drives increase speed perfromance?i think SATA 3.0 should take care of it from one HDD alone

3)Whats the File transfer time from one HDD to another compared to file transfer between one HDD itself?

4)Any other reasons?

 

[shane799]

Hey
What are you using the drive for. If its Mass storage(Movies, Music), then what you are getting is great(Thought its a bad time to buy one.) The prices are really high right now, double what they will be again in a few months.

If you need a faster solutions then raid can be the answer. But I think its kind of silly these days to consider RAID for the speed reasons when a SSD will beat it anyway. RAID can also provide a continus back up of your data onto two drivers(diffrent RAID setup). Anyway if you don't know the basics of RAID you don't need it anyway.
It used to be used for speed! Now RAID HDD's are slower than simple SSD drives.
If I were you I would get the cheapest 1 GB HDD drive you can get now, and save the rest of your cash. In six months you will be able to buy 2 more 2GB HDD's with the money.

 

[nukemaster]

1) IF you are writing and reading to both drives(lets say one is windows and the other is your files) each read/write will happen faster. With raid0, read/writes are faster, but access times are not. Some programs will have huge speed improvements(sequential reads/writes) and others will not(Random reads/writes).

2) Hard drives do not come close to the SATA 3gigabite/sec anyway. In raid file transfers are faster(even more so from one raid setup to another)

3) When you transfer from a drive to it self, if it is cut(ctrl+X) it is instant, for a copy operation it is slower because the same drive has to move the head, read, move to the other location and write. Since it does this over and over again, it is far slower then a drive to drive transfer.

4) If you have all your files/doc/desktop on a second drive, if you reinstall windows, your files are unaffected. A backup solution is still desired in case the drive malfunctions/fails or gets infected.

Just to add, i have always had my files on different drives and normally had windows on a Raid0 volume(normally with 3 drives for that it self). That said, My current system has 1 drive for windows with SSD Cache from Intel and a second drive for my files/docs/desktop. I also have another drive external for backups.

What works for me, may not work for you.

 

[house70]

I have to assume that you're getting a 3TB drive because you have a vast amount of files that need storage. However, unless they're video files, it will take longer to fill that drive than the actual life span of that drive, meaning it will die on you before you get it half full.
Now, if you get it for storage of large files, keep in mind that if anything happens to it, all your data is lost. People recommend RAID for a good reason, which is if one disk fails (it happens), you can still have your data until you replace it.
About the 3TB drives per-se... I never used one, and I would really look into reliability figures before having all my data on it. I don't think they have been around long enough to have reliable reports like that (I might be wrong, though). Even without RAID, consider putting your data on one smaller HDD, filling it up and then switching to another HDD, vs. putting all your data on one HDD only. That would be like putting all your eggs in one basket. Not wise.
The other use could be a system drive (OS drive). That is overkill for any OS installation, see my first paragraph why.

 

[snakenobi]

Best answer selected by snakenobi.

 

[snakenobi]

thanks both of you

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey