Multiple Harddrives

What's the benefit/downfalls of multiple hardrives? Is it just for space? Is that western digital 640mb really actually good for that cheap?!

Multiple drives can be used in different ways, from backups incase you have a drive failure, to reading from more than one at once, lowering you load times.
And I assume you mean 640GB, but yes, it is a good deal.
There are downsides though, mainly that if you use striping for faster load times, and you loose one drive, you loose them all if you didnt also have backups (which requires additional drives)

There was a thread on this pretty recently:

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=567238&highlight=multiple+drives



Personally I just like having available space to backup data in case I do something stupid like kill a necessary process while using Diskeeper (only did this once) or for backing up a client's machine for a rebuild. Also, if a drive failed I'd have plenty of fall-back space while waiting on an RMA.

I just want a good amount of space for games and those games to run quickly (also maybe to backup files so I don't lose them, can this be explained?). I may start torrenting, video editing and such also whenI make my computer. If I got two drives what would be the best combination?

I'd say a decent-sized but fast drive for your OS and system applications (partition the rest for storage since you won't be using it all that much), and a larger secondary drive like one of the 640AAKS WD's for the secondary. For the second drive you can just partition it to suit, ie torrentspace, storage, and/or gaming. It really all depends on how you plan to use your system and the amount of space you think you'll end up needing. Assuming you don't plan to go with a RAID setup, you'll still see performance increases loading your applications/games from a different drive (on a different channel - although SATA nullifies this) than your OS drive. If you plan to do torrenting from that drive while gaming you won't see any, or will only see minimal performance increases though.


Depending on torrenting you might want to allocate more of your space to that and video-editing, leave a moderate partition for the OS (~40GB for XP, ~50 for Vista), whatever you need for games/applications, and less space to storage.

grumperfish said:

Assuming you don't plan to go with a RAID setup, you'll still see performance increases loading your applications/games from a different drive (on a different channel - although SATA nullifies this) than your OS drive.

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Wouldn't installing the games/apps on the faster OS drive give more of a performance increase versus being on the slower 640? ie. OS, apps and games on a VelociRaptor with data like music, video, documents on the 640.