2 hard disks 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?

 

[johns]

Silly. Buy one bigger hard drive, and toss the other.

johns

 

[sa11ysmail]

No. Because it's not worth it. The pc's are like celeron 700's with 256
RAM. I've a bunch of 4,8 & 10 gig drives lying around that I want to
find a use for. I hate chucking things out!

 

[sbb78247]

No. Because it's not worth it. The pc's are like celeron 700's with
256 RAM. I've a bunch of 4,8 & 10 gig drives lying around that I want
to find a use for. I hate chucking things out!

not much you can do to help that lot. but if you insist, put the second
drive on the 2nd ide channel to help with "bandwidth" (like there is any on
that thing).

 

[Conor]

No. Because it's not worth it. The pc's are like celeron 700's with 256
RAM. I've a bunch of 4,8 & 10 gig drives lying around that I want to
find a use for. I hate chucking things out!

So let me get this right. You want to speed up the PC by adding more
drives but you're going to use old clunkers that crawl along?

 

[sa11ysmail]

So let me get this right. You want to speed up the PC by adding more
drives but you're going to use old clunkers that crawl along?

I was asking more out of curiosity than anything. I should've
mentioned I would only pair like with like e.g. 2 x 8GB drives or
2x10GB drives of same spec. per machine. Adding an extra drive space
(and doubling the RAM) can make these old systems more of a usable
proposition to some people. I just wondered about whether it might make
a slight speed difference as well. It seems it won't help much from
that POV.
Thanks for replying.

 

[Marty]

I was asking more out of curiosity than anything. I should've
mentioned I would only pair like with like e.g. 2 x 8GB drives or
2x10GB drives of same spec. per machine. Adding an extra drive space
(and doubling the RAM) can make these old systems more of a usable
proposition to some people. I just wondered about whether it might make
a slight speed difference as well. It seems it won't help much from
that POV.
Thanks for replying.

Adding a second drive and putting the pagefile will increase the overall
performance slightly. The pagefile on the second drive will allow the
first drive to not work as hard during high memory applications. Have at
it!!

 

[mayayana]

I don't know about speed. That seems unlikely
to matter. But I always have 2 drives going.
A failed drive is by far the most common
PC disaster and they're just not very expensive
compared to other parts.

I like to keep small OS partitions
(under 2 GB) and then keep all data on
partitions that are redundant across 2 drives.
Then if the OS fails I just reinstall a disk image.
If a drive fails I have backup.

 

[John Doe]

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.

Apparently the storage group thinks that setup makes a negligible
speed difference.

A 10000 rpm hard drive probably means better performance, that's
what I'm using.

 

[adsci]

on the same cable is never recommended and is slow since on every
read/write to the pagefile the hd need to be switched. buy another
controller.