dumb HD question.

[freonsmurf]

I know the answer, I just don't like it.

I have a 120G in a C&D partition.
I have about 40 gigs of stuff on D I want to keep.
Thinking about getting a 10,000 rpm 36 gig drive. I want to use it for OS. Doesnt seem possible without losing all the stuff onmy current drive.

If I left my current drive alone and just ran games off the 10,000 would the performance benefit still be worth it or would I be hampered by the OS on running on the old HS?

[EZ_Talius]

Is the 40 gigs all games and programs, or are they movies / mp3's/p0rn?

If it's all games then you might want to reconsider buying the second drive altogether. Running two drives will invariably be slower then running just one.

Does the first drive have an 8 meg cache? Does the second? If the second doesn't, it won't be that much of a noticable upgrade, as far as I know.

If it does have an 8 meg cache I would suggest putting the OS and the games on the new drive, and leave the second drive as a storage one. There's no reason not to have two HDs unless there's no room

[freonsmurf]

I am slowly running out of room. 50 gigs free between both partitions, I would like to get more room.
My current drive is 8megcache 8000 rpm. Dvd burner could solve my problems though. Big files are mostly movies, mp3s,videos

I can do serial ata or should I just wait and wait for and upgrade to that down the line?

[Ruccus]

I'm not sure why you think there will be some sort of problem - All you'd do is install the 36G drive alone, format and install the OS, then install your old drive. After rebooting, go into the bios and set the 36G drive to primary and you'll be booting off the 36g drive yet you'll have the information from the 120g drive.

I have a 120g SATA drive and while I don't currently have it plugged in, my old 30G IDE drive is still in my computer ready to be plugged into the motherboard and powered up should I need it. I also transferred files between the two drives before going solely with my 120GB drive.

[freonsmurf]

but with the new drive won't every single file on my old drive be a sea of broken links? every program/shortcut will be pointing to something that isn't there

[Ruccus]

You wouldn't have your desktop shortcuts and you'd have to "Explore" the old drive to get to the files (until you go through and re-link them to the new os using shortcuts), but they will be there.

[freonsmurf]

but the registry links will still be fubar?

[Ruccus]

You're not going to be using your old OS so your old registry is irrelevant - you'll be using a new install of the OS with its own registry. The old OS will still be on the old hard drive, but since you won't be booting from the old drive (after you make it the secondary drive in the BIOS) you won't be using it.

When you make the new drive the primary drive, it will be C: drive and your other drive's partitions should be recognized in the new OS as being D: and E: drives.

Edit: I'll install my old drive and take some screencaps to show you what I mean, though since my old drive has three partitions it'll arrange itself a bit differently. Edited by: Ruccus at: 12/14/03 5:10 pm

[Ruccus]

Okay, here we go:

This is what my two drives (one single partition SATA drive, the other a three partition IDE drive) look like when I boot from the new drive:



Note the "Local Drive" (the new drive), and my CD and DVD drives, then my three old partitions.

But when I boot from the old drive, this is what it looks like:


Note now the three old drive partitions are C through E, then the CD and DVD drives, and finally the new drive. I took the above screencap in the old OS and saved it to the old "My Pictures" folder (which was in the "old2" drive, currently using D: slot). I intentionally left it there so I could reboot to the new OS, then retrieve it.

Below is a screencap of me finding the old boot order's screencap:



Note how now that the old drive is secondary, what was once D: drive is now G: drive. I can still open the folders and rummage through them to search for the pic I need. Once I found it, I just opened the My Pictures folder of my new OS, and dragged and dropped the picture into it. And even the file systems of the two drives are different; all three partitions of my old drive are FAT32 formats, while the new drive is NTFS format.

[freonsmurf]

who is dean clark?

heh, thanks man

now when you try to run a program on your old HD when it is F: and not C: it wont run, correct?

[Ruccus]

It'll run just fine, but you have to actually go into the proper folder to launch the program.

For example, my old WinXP installation has 3DMark2003 installed, and a shortcut on the desktop so to launch it I just click the shortcut. Because I'm not using my old WinXP installation, I have to manually go to G: Program files> Futuremark> 3DMark03 and click on the 3DMark03.exe icon to run it.

If you want to link to it for future reference, you can create a shortcut of the icon and drag it to your desktop so next time you can just click on the desktop shortcut. The only thing is that you can't uninstall the game/demo from the new OS because it wasn't installed by the new OS; you'll have to boot into the old OS and uninstall it from there.

Edit: Previously I played a couple videos and 3DMark03's demo from the hard drive and they worked fine, but I went into the old hard to launch Thief 2 and found it wouldn't recognize the CD in the drive. Whether it's just because it's an old game I'm not sure, but I decided to try and launch EverQuest (it's on the same partition as Thief2) and it launched and patched normally (though since I'm not currently playing EQ I didn't try to log on). Thief 2 was the only game I still had on my old drives which needed the CD to run, so I'm not sure if it will be a problem for all games or just older games. Edited by: Ruccus at: 12/14/03 7:36 pm

[EZ_InvisiBill]

Some things will work and some things won't. EQ doesn't need to be installed really. The installation program creates the shortcuts to make it easier to start, and some registry entries so future expansion installers can easily find the EQ directory. The game itself is just the files in the directory though.

Other programs rely on settings stored in the registry. Some install files into locations other than the main installation directory, and therefore will not work if those other files aren't where they expect (like in your new Windows directory).

I'm not sure what Talius was thinking. First he says that running two drives will be slower than one, then that there's no reason to not have two drives. If you have two drives, it will be faster assuming things are set up right. I honestly don't know the specific details of this, but a slow device on one IDE channel can slow down the other device on that channel. In other words, plugging in the 100MB hard drive out of your 486 to the same cable as your brand new 50000000GB drive could slow down the new drive to the "lowest common denominator". I don't know the specifics on this because I have enough IDE channels that I have only one device on each channel.

Assuming that old hardware isn't limiting new hardware, a second drive will speed things up. Two read/write heads mean that the second drive can be accessing your EQ files at the same time as the first drive is accessing your Windows files. This is how RAID0 (striping) works. The RAID controller makes two physical hard drives appear to be one drive. Rather than writing 10MB to one hard drive, it can write 5MB to the first drive and 5MB to the second drive, at the same time. In theory, you can do twice as much in the same time, i.e. double the HD speed. In reality, all the other stuff involved with hard drive activities creates overhead so that it's not truly twice the speed, but it is still a huge improvement. It's the physical aspect of a hard drive that limits its speed - even the 7200RPM drives can't come close to maxing out ATA/133 or even ATA/100 for more than a brief spike.

The usefulness of the cache will depend on exactly what the hard drive is accessing. Memory is still faster than the physical disk though, so more won't hurt.

If you delete the first partition on your old drive and resize the second partition for the whole disk, you could keep C: for the OS (new drive) and D: for your games and stuff (old drive). As I said, some things will still work and some stuff won't. It simply depends on the program in question. Reinstalling all your stuff to the existing location should fix any broken or missing shortcuts without losing any of your data. Again, that depends on the program though. Some crappy installers will simply overwrite anything in the directory and fun stuff like that.