Four Hard Drives are Better Than One - Right?

By Sir Topham Hatt
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Grand Master

Sir Topham Hatt

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Hello

The way i have my hard drives set at the moment is:

2 x 500Gb partitioned into:

4 x 200Gb

4 x 200Gb

2 x 100Gb

Is this safer than having a 1Tb drive split into the same partitions?

Just making sure for a future computer build, that I would be better buying lower capacity disks and having more of them.

Don't really need to know about RAID or anything as I don't use it.

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Grand Master

+Gary7 Subscriber²

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I have four Hard Drives.

3 1TB drives

1 500GB drive.

I would like to get an SSD but they do not have enough capacity and they cost too much. If you have everything on one drive and it goes bad then you may be in trouble. I do use Windows Backup to Image my main drive and it does work.

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Grand Master

Draconian Guppy

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I dunno... partitioning is only a good alternative when you have only 1 HD... and having only 1 HD is a big no no if you ask me.

IMO best setup is:

1. Fast hd for boot up/ os /critical programs etc. (ssd, raptor

2. Semi fast (7200rpm ) For normalware

3. storage 1TB.

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Experienced

imachip

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Partitions are useful when having one HD but more than 3 (OS, Data and Backup) is pretty overkill as you end up just spanning the same things across several of them when one area fills up quicker than another. (why not just use folders?)

This only saves against partition errors which rarely happens on modern filesystems (or anything not FAT32/16). You are far more likely to suffer a hardware (mechanical/controller) failure of the hard drive than anything else so buy another drive or an external if you're serious about protecting whats sitting on it. Putting it on across different partitions on the same h/w is false security imo.

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Grand Master

+Gary7 Subscriber²

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ssd for boot

500gb - 1tb for apps, short terms doc

RAID 5 NAS for media, long term doc storage etc

KISS and Keep it reliable

The prices for tha Raid 5 NAS are not all that high if they come with drives.

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Grand Master

primexx

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two HDDs in RAID0 is half as reliable as one HDD alone, assuming independent drives (i.e. no failure correlation, which in many case is a bad assumption since if you buy two at the same time they're almost certainly from the same batch). two HDDs in RAID1, on the other hand, would be twice as reliable with the same assumption, and at the very least more reliable than a single HDD even if their failures are correlated (one's failure should give you a warning about the other one's imminent failure, giving you time to pull a final backup off it). The parity methods (like RAID5, mentioned above) will also be more reliable than a single HDD since they have redundancy, exactly how much more reliable depends on the method used.

If you're simply splitting all your data across two separate disks, you're not increasing the total reliability of your data as a whole, but sure, if one fails that means you only lose half your data. Not very reassuring imo.

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Grand Master

Open Minded

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I've noticed that the more dives I have, the longer it takes BF:BC2 to play AFTER the map is loaded. It (for some reason) spins-up the hard drives that are asleep about 3 seconds after joining a server for the first time and takes sometimes 15 seconds to finish. It's fine after that, though.

About what Primexx said about a RAID 0, it's not actually half as reliable. I read a post by someone long ago that was way better at math than I, broke it down and it's only about a 10% decrease with each drive you add to a RAID 0 array. With that said, I'd rather have almost double the throughput with only a 10% hit in reliability. But that's my computing needs, it may not be yours. I hate waiting for things to load.

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Grand Master

Seizure1990

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Games

Programs

Windows

Projects

Archiving

Documents

:)

That's what folders are for.

And from a safety perspective, multiple partitions on one hard drive is just as likely to die on you, as a single partition is. Multiple physical devices are the only way to improve safety.

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Grand Master

chconline Veteran

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Technically yes, but if you're really into data safety (Redundancy), then go for RAID 1. And as everyone else says, nothing can ever replace backups :p

Personally I always have one drive in my desktop computer, plus one SSD. Not that I really care about power efficiency, but the more HDDs, the noisier. For my server and NAS, I got RAID 1 and RAID 5, respectively, for redundancy purposes. That has always worked for me.

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Grand Master

ozgeek

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Multiple phyical drives is better than partitions. I learnt this from experience. My current drive config is:

1 x 320GB for Windows and usual software (firefox, thunderbird, ms office, adobe, etc)

2 x 1TB (one for Steam and one for my personal files and TV recorded shows)

1 x 1TB external drive (backup of my personal files).

1x 2TB external drive (media, movies and storage of more recorded tv shows), also contains another backup copy of my personal files.

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Grand Master

Sir Topham Hatt

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If you're simply splitting all your data across two separate disks, you're not increasing the total reliability of your data as a whole, but sure, if one fails that means you only lose half your data. Not very reassuring imo.

I guess I separated them so each physical drive would work half as much as if I just had a bunch of folders on one drive.

Windows / Documents / Archive on one.

Games / Programs / Projects on the other, or something similar.

I guess in the future I'll buy perhaps another 1Tb drive, then have the three so I still share the workload between them and have an increase in capacity. But then I plan to introduce an SSD for windows, possibly windows only), so I may not need to purchase another hard drive at all, and just put the Windows disk space into another of the volumes, or even have it as another drive all together.

That's what folders are for.

And from a safety perspective, multiple partitions on one hard drive is just as likely to die on you, as a single partition is. Multiple physical devices are the only way to improve safety.

:p I just use different drives instead of folders. It makes things neater I think :)

But this is the kinda answer I was looking for. If I have ten 10Gb drives, that would be safer than one 1Tb drive cause if that single drive fails, then the whole lot is gone. I guess is it more of a question for the computing power too. I don't want the PC to panic out because there's five or six drives attached rather than just two or three.

It's not really about storing the data in case I loose it. I have an external hard drive with my photos on it. Those are also burned to a DVD periodically too. Anything else (games, programs) is replaceable should the worst happen, but in my years of computing, nothing has happened like that.

Although I am starting to think putting programs with Windows on the one [sSD] disk might be a better idea than having them on a separate partition. Although keeping them separate does make cleaning windows a bit easier.

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Grand Master

Seizure1990

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Any modern PC can take 10, or more, drives. You're more likely to be limited by the number of ports on your board, or number of bays in your case.

I'm not sure how having multiple partitions would make things neater. That would drive me nuts, personally. I have one Raptor drive for my OS and applications, and then a 500GB Spinpoint for everything else. I also moved my personal folders (MY Music, My Pictures, My Documents, etc) to the storage drive. Everything is sorted by directories, and I never have trouble finding anything.

Having said all that, to each his own. Multiple partitions won't hurt anything either.

One final note: Don't call partitions drives. It's confusing. I know they are referred to Drive C, Drive D, etc for each partition, but those are actually "logical drives", while the HDD its self is the "physical drive". However, nobody ever bothers to say "physical drive", so when you say "my drive", technical folk will assume you mean an actual physical HDD. the drive is the box, and a partition is a portion of that drive.

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Grand Master

ViperAFK

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I have 4 drives cause I just tend to buy a new one when I'm running low on space, no real rhyme to my setup but it works well. Right now I have:

320gb WD black + 64 gb Vertex2 (OS drive and cache drive via intel smart response)

750GB WD Black (Torrents/Music)

750GB WD Black (Games + Music/torrents backup)

More drives can have a few advantages: Redundancy, spreading disk intensive stuff across drives. I find having a data drive dedicated games helps my loading times, also when I am encoding/transcoding stuff I have it write to another drive.

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Grand Master

primexx

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I've noticed that the more dives I have, the longer it takes BF:BC2 to play AFTER the map is loaded. It (for some reason) spins-up the hard drives that are asleep about 3 seconds after joining a server for the first time and takes sometimes 15 seconds to finish. It's fine after that, though.

About what Primexx said about a RAID 0, it's not actually half as reliable. I read a post by someone long ago that was way better at math than I, broke it down and it's only about a 10% decrease with each drive you add to a RAID 0 array. With that said, I'd rather have almost double the throughput with only a 10% hit in reliability. But that's my computing needs, it may not be yours. I hate waiting for things to load.

hmm, that's interesting, wonder how they calculated it. with SSDs though I don't really see the point in RAID0 arrays anymore since if you really want performance the answer is pretty clear which way you'd go... unless you're RAID0ing SSDs, of course :p

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