2 hard disk means better performance?

[sa11ysmail]

I'm looking to to upgrade & extend the life of some old pc's. Adding
another IDE hard disk on the same ide cable will increase the hard disk
capacity of the machine of course, but could it also make the machine
slightly quicker as well?

E.g. if on windows you set the pagefile on the primary slave hdd. I'm
thinking about 2 read/write heads available instead of 1.

What do you think?

 

[Emperor's New Widescreen]

I'm looking to to upgrade & extend the life of some old pc's. Adding
another IDE hard disk on the same ide cable will increase the hard disk
capacity of the machine of course, but could it also make the machine
slightly quicker as well?

E.g. if on windows you set the pagefile on the primary slave hdd. I'm
thinking about 2 read/write heads available instead of 1.

What do you think?

Probably it should mean less mean movement overall
especially if you organise you data suitably. I have
a similar setup. I am not sue if both disks can be in use
at the 'same tine' though for some technical reason.
I have never really tested it though.
In some cases it will be slower though for example
when you move a folder. If its on the same drive
it just has to update a table however if its on a different
driver its a lenghty movement of the folders contents.

 

[philo]

I'm looking to to upgrade & extend the life of some old pc's. Adding
another IDE hard disk on the same ide cable will increase the hard disk
capacity of the machine of course, but could it also make the machine
slightly quicker as well?

E.g. if on windows you set the pagefile on the primary slave hdd. I'm
thinking about 2 read/write heads available instead of 1.

What do you think?

If the old drive is 5400rpm
and the new one 7200rpm...
you will prob be better off just to get rid of the old drive entirely

 

[BitBucket]

I would recommend, to install the second drive on the second IDE port
of the motherboard. There are different IDE speeds available.
Expressed in ATA/33, ATA/66, ATA/100, and ATA/133. The number
denotes the clock speed of the port /device. Dissimilar speed
drives on the same IDE port will force the bios to operate based on
slowest HD. Also, if you're lucky, the motherboard may support a
faster ATA, so if you install the new HD on the second IDE port by
itself it may run at it's rated speed. i.e. putting a new 7200 rpm
ATA/133 HD as a slave to an older ATA/33 HD will effectively sloooow
down your new drive.

 

[DaveW]

What you are suggesting is true ONLY if the two harddrives are setup in a
RAID 0 array (an advanced and difficult project). With two harddrives on
the same IDE cable you simply have more capacity.

 

[Emperor's New Widescreen]

I am not sure about that.
If access is between mainly two files oe on either drive
the head does not have to switch between files as much as
it will usually be the right track or close to it.

 

[kony]

I'm looking to to upgrade & extend the life of some old pc's. Adding
another IDE hard disk on the same ide cable will increase the hard disk
capacity of the machine of course, but could it also make the machine
slightly quicker as well?

E.g. if on windows you set the pagefile on the primary slave hdd. I'm
thinking about 2 read/write heads available instead of 1.

What do you think?

Ideally you would not have them both on same cable, isn't
that possible?

Do the systems have plenty of memory? That is the first
step towards decreasing the performance penalty from hitting
the pagefile for *real* virtual memory needs opposed to just
mapping out unused memory space.

Setting the pagefile on the second drive will help in all
those situations it's hitting the file, though as another
poster mentioned, if the 2nd drive is much slower than the
primary (OS) drive, the benefit diminishes or goes away
entirely.

Often a second drive is also used to split up file I/O, for
example the operating system is on one drive, the
applications on the other, and when working with large files
in an application, those are stored opposite the (OS or
applications, whichever are the more demanding concurrent
filesystem I/O).

With certain applications using fairly large files such as
video editing, it can also make sense to put the larger
(often uncompressed) files opposite the most used OS or app
files and the compressed files on the same drive as the
app/OS. In other apps the app will allow specifying a
scratch disc and that would again be put on the lesser used
drive of the two at the time of the job run.

Overall the easy answer to just put a NEW drive in the
system and max out the memory. It will help a lot for
general purpose use. For a more workstation-like single
use that heavily stresses the CPU, there's not much the
drives will do to offset that.

 

[Sleepy]

I'm looking to to upgrade & extend the life of some old pc's. Adding
another IDE hard disk on the same ide cable will increase the hard disk
capacity of the machine of course, but could it also make the machine
slightly quicker as well?

E.g. if on windows you set the pagefile on the primary slave hdd. I'm
thinking about 2 read/write heads available instead of 1.

What do you think?

thats what Ive done and it did help performance noticeably when I only had
512mb RAM and was trying to play HL2 for the first time. Upping the RAM to
1gb was more of a benefit but putting a fixed swapfile on the slave drive
did help.

 

[XModem]

You've got to be kidding

Ideally you would not have them both on same cable, isn't
that possible?

Do the systems have plenty of memory? That is the first
step towards decreasing the performance penalty from hitting
the pagefile for *real* virtual memory needs opposed to just
mapping out unused memory space.

Setting the pagefile on the second drive will help in all
those situations it's hitting the file, though as another
poster mentioned, if the 2nd drive is much slower than the
primary (OS) drive, the benefit diminishes or goes away
entirely.

Often a second drive is also used to split up file I/O, for
example the operating system is on one drive, the
applications on the other, and when working with large files
in an application, those are stored opposite the (OS or
applications, whichever are the more demanding concurrent
filesystem I/O).

With certain applications using fairly large files such as
video editing, it can also make sense to put the larger
(often uncompressed) files opposite the most used OS or app
files and the compressed files on the same drive as the
app/OS. In other apps the app will allow specifying a
scratch disc and that would again be put on the lesser used
drive of the two at the time of the job run.

Overall the easy answer to just put a NEW drive in the
system and max out the memory. It will help a lot for
general purpose use. For a more workstation-like single
use that heavily stresses the CPU, there's not much the
drives will do to offset that.