Second hard drive question

[1stPersonTooter]

Good afternoon forum, I need some expertise. I just bought a new (300 GB, 16 MB 7200 rpm) hard drive and I'm not sure if I should use it as the boot drive and use the older hard drive(80 GB, 8 MB, 7200 rpm) as the slave. Would it be better to boot from, and store the OS files on the hard drive with the 16 MB cache? Or does it not make that much of a difference?

 

[ScrapSilicon]

I'd up the 80 to the 300 by way of ghost placing the larger as boot and leaving the 80 intact as an inactive(out of the system) backup

 

[1stPersonTooter]

After I did that I could delete all the old OS files from the 80 GB HD by quick formatting right? Also does XP Home have that type of ghost software? Because I'm not too familiar with that whole process

 

[tallman45]

I would partition the 300GB into a 20GB OS partition, best to keep your OS on a a drive with a higher density platter and the 16mb cache. Use the 80gb drive to put your page data file on.

 

[1stPersonTooter]

What is a good program do this...... partition OS space on the 300 GB HD and then transfer all the OS files from the 80 GB HD

Also what kind of performance gains would I see using a 16 MB cache opposed to a 8 MB cache

Thanks again in advance!

 

[Duvie]

I personally would not use any of the HDD's as Slaves....Do not put them on the same channel....

Go like this...

primary:

master = 300gb HDD
slave = dvd/rom - cd/rom

secondary:

master = 80gb HDD or DVD-RW/+RW
slave = DVD-RW/+RW or 80gb HDD

the reason for the last part is some burner drives perfer master settings....though I never had an issue with it

This is how I ran my settings when I had IDE HDDs...It was optimal for CD to CD burning and HDD to HDD backups...separate channels avoid I/O bottlenecks....

If HDDs are on same channel you will be bottlenecked when using files between the drives as only one read or write command can be executed at a time..per channel...

 

[Bobthelost]

The benifits of the cache aren't huge. However the new drive is much larger, newer and thus faster.

You can transfer the OS using ghost (if it works, i can' get it to do so). Or a hundred different programs, some better, some free, some easier to use...

 

[Zepper]

Theoretically, a large cache should help in random access. The WD 250GB drive w/16MB cache is a pretty poor performer overall relative to other 250GB drives. See the comparo review on storagereview.com. If you want really fast sequential read (for fast booting and program loading), a couple of Hitachi 7K80s in RAID-0 would be cool.

.bh.

 

[newuser]

what brand drive did you get?

if you go to the manuf. website, they usually have a small program that will format/partition and copy your old HDD over to the new one

seagate has this utitilty on their website

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

But the thing is that not only is the 16MB cache better, the 300GB drive is probably based on larger platters, and is probably newer.

Drives get faster because of firmware updates as well as larger aerial density sizes.

If you're talking about the 7200.9, you have 3x 100gb platters I believe? You might even have a 2x166gb short stroked drive which is better. 80gb? Probably 80gb platters or something small.

I recommend partitioning hte 300gb drive and then use it as your master. Newer drives are usually faster unless you bought some cheaper crap which you obviously didn't do.