HDD: Single 2TB vs. 2 x 1TB

[faraway]

Hi, i'm looking to get a 2TB internal hdd and i was set on Seagate Barracuda 2TB. But now what i'm thinking is to get 2 WD Blue 1TB drives instead of a single 2TB Seagate. The reason for me to think about this is that the WD Blue has somewhat better speeds and it comes even cheaper this way. Now the questions are;

-How could i make this work?
-What are the advantages/disadvantages-if any- to it?

 

[ThatVietGuy]

I think going with the 2x1TB setup would be better since you don't have all your data on one drive. If that one drive fails say goodbye to a lot of stuff.

As for making it work, you don't need to do anything other than install the drives and use them.

 

[muddywarrior]

Yes, you could make it work. If your motherboard supports RAID, you can stripe them. Speaking of which, check if you have two spare SATA3 ports on your motherboard. Or leave them as two separate drives.

Advantages of raid 0 is faster read/write speed. Disadvantage is higher risk of data loss.

 

[SBMfromLA]

Not sure how much storage you need but personally, I would opt for the single 2TB Drive... A 1TB might not be enough and if you filled it up you would need to pick up a third drive.

I recommend that you only go with the two-drive layout if you plan on doing RAID.. Also, you would save on a SATA port and have less energy costs if you went with a single drive.

 

[faraway]

Yes, you could make it work. If your motherboard supports RAID, you can stripe them. Speaking of which, check if you have two spare SATA3 ports on your motherboard. Or leave them as two separate drives.

Advantages of raid 0 is faster read/write speed. Disadvantage is higher risk of data loss.

As i read more on RAID, i see a lot talk about risk of data loss with RAID-0, and that the faster r/w speeds aren't that fast in practice. So is it worth it? Below, is the link to the benchmark comparison results between the 2 drives. Also, can't i just connect them-2 x 1TB- as separate drives, without merging in any way, would that slow the system down in any way?

http://hdd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Seagate-Barracuda-720014-2TB-vs-WD-Blue-1TB-2012/1619vs1779

I think going with the 2x1TB setup would be better since you don't have all your data on one drive. If that one drive fails say goodbye to a lot of stuff.

As for making it work, you don't need to do anything other than install the drives and use them.

So, you're suggesting a non-raid system with separately connected drives, right? Cause from what i understand, RAID-0 is the only viable option for me, and it's not fail-proof.

 

[utgotye]

If you want to see any noticeable performance gain, you will have to increase the number of drives. RAID5 has striping and parity, which will give you speed and fault tolerance though there are issues with it as well, plus you need a minimum of three drives. The larger the array, the more I like RAID5. RAID10 or 0+1 is safer. in my opinion, for smaller arrays. It provides striping and mirroring which can allow for multiple disk failures, depending on the size of the array. Plus there are less issues with unrecoverable disk errors which will break your array.

I'm looking into a 4-6 drive RAID!) or 0+1 array at the moment for both media and backups as well as family photos and videos...stuff like that.

 

[muddywarrior]

Yea you don't have to use raid. Instead of a striped 2tb E drive, you will have a 1tb E and 1tb F drive.

 

[faraway]

Yea you don't have to use raid. Instead of a striped 2tb E drive, you will have a 1tb E and 1tb F drive.

Ok, but what about the performance difference? I'm talking about the specs of each individual disk, as i linked the comparison above. It appears that WD has better random speed rates here and there, and that's about it. Would that really mean it's generally faster than Seagate one?

 

[muddywarrior]

Yes, the WD is generally faster than the sea gate but not by terribly much. Since you will be using it for storage, you will mainly do sequential read/ writes, which are roughly the same.
IMO there won't be a noticeable real world performance difference between the drives.

 

[SBMfromLA]

Yeah... you won't really notice any difference in speed. If that's your priority, then you should use an SSD for your O/S and browser and a mechanical hard drive for your storage.

 

[faraway]

Thanks all, for the answers. Went with a single drive after all.

 

[SBMfromLA]

Thanks all, for the answers. Went with a single drive after all.

cool... so you're taking my advice then?? awesome

 

[gilaphreak]

If you're wanting speed, then an SSD is the way to go.

A common setup is to get a big HDD for bulk storage that doesn't need fast speeds (Pictures, music, etc) and a SDD to store the OS on.

Who can argue with 10s boot times? 😀