Switching hard drives worthwhile?

switch hard drives worthwhile?

I procured a new second hard drive for my 2+ year old desktop for the purpose of backing up the existing hard drive but mostly to provide a readily available replacement in the event of the failure of the existing hard drive.

In attempting to avoid potential complications in this process, the new hard drive closely mirrors the old hard drive with a few exceptions.

• the new drive is twice the capacity of the old one (80 gb : 40 gb)

• the old drive is formatted FAT32, rated at 5400 RPM, with an IDE Ultra ATA/100 interface

• the new drive is formatted NTFS, rated at 7200 RPM, also with an IDE Utlra Ata/100 interface, but is supposedly "lightning fast" due to an 8mb cache

I have not yet determined data rates or any performance stats, but am now wondering if instead of using the new drive for backup, if I would switch to the new drive as the boot drive and use the old drive for backup, would there be worthwhile throughput gains…

Lastly, if the switch is reccomended, what types of problems might I expect to surface, and what should do to try to avoid potential problems?

 

I would change to the new drive and use the old one as the backup/storage drive. 7200 is faster than 5400 and has the 8Mb cache that's faster than the mechanical seek time of the drive and is usefull in getting smaller amounts of data out, so that's a no brainer.

Real world improvement will only be a few percent at best, but that's good enough reason to change. Also the new drive in theory should have better reliability due to less use.

BUT I bought a new SATA 120GB Seagate last week that mechanically failed after only a few hours of use. That may have been heat related or just bad luck.

NTFS is better than FAT32 in security and cluster size which translates to more storage, Not a real problem as you can always convert you existing drive to NTFS providing you're using 2000/XP, although a reformat is better for changing to NTFS.

As far as problems, no more than with any drive. Use the defragmenter programme on a regular basis, which will reduce mechanical seeking of the read head(s), which in theory translates to improved reliability (as well as improved performance)

 

Hi keywester,

I generally agree with Paul....but I have discussed getting the maximum speed out of multiple HDDs with my IT (storage) nephew. We came to an opinion that if you have Windows on one harddrive and your applications on another this should improve overall performance letting each take a share of the load.

Something else you could do is, if you have Norton Utilities, get the disk optimiser to set the pagefile at the front of the fastest disk.

Because a lot of Windows is loaded at startup you could probably leave it on the slow drive and have the pagefile and applications on the fast drive. Anyway, sounds good on paper (I haven't been able to try it yet, all my HDDs are in their own machines).

Another good tip I found was to make a drive to locate temporary files like CD or DVD burning files that are frequently overwritten, thus saving your main drives from "fragmentation ". You can also transfer your temporary internet files there as well using Internet Explorer>Tools > Internet Options > Temporary Internet Files >settings >move folder.

Matt

 

Very helpful info, thanks....

Matt: I dont have Norton Utils, but I do have Drive Image and Partition Magic, and would guess that I could accomplish equivalent tasks with them, altho documentation on them is woefully inadequate, but I am guessing that minimally I could create partitions on whichever drive and somehow migrate whatever folders/files to them as per reccomendations...

 

Keywester, I missed the point about your drive rpms. I'd say go for it. When I first swapped out my 5400rpm drive for my first 7200rpm it was like an epiphany - i.e. the result was dramatic and very noticeable. Much more noticeable than any cpu upgrade I've every done. HDD speed is probably the most important component in the overall "speed feel" of your system as it's the slowest component in your box.

Gary

 

If it is possible to put files on different drives then a large number of drives would be better than one large drive.