BleepingComputer.com: Dual hard drives

Hi, I would like to know if it would be good to use a IDE and a SATA?
I have a 640 GB Sata and a 10/40GB IDE hard drive, so I would like to use one of them to run Vista, while the other to just run stuff and hold memory.
Is this a good configuration? Would the speeds benefit me alot? thank you.

The sata is faster than the IDE and as the IDE is pretty small there is no real benefit to adding it to your system. You could use it for storage, but it would slow down your system. If you really want to use it, use it as an external USB drive in an enclosure.

as long as you didnt use the IDE drive as the boot device, it wont slow down your overall performance, just the access time getting files off that drive. but wolfs right, I would put the IDE into an external enclosure if it were me, or just use it to put backups on. theres no real advantage to useing a 40 gig hard IDE drive for storage when you have a 640 gig SATA II drive.

Hmmm...I approach it differently (not necessarily better).

I use my smallest PATA hard drives as boot/system drives, since the smallest SATA drive I have is 250GB. I use my 20GB, 30GB, and 40GB PATA hard drives to install XP and programs on. It allows me to have a system partition which is about the size I want it and on a separate hard drive/controller. It also facilitates any chkdsk or defrag function I want to do on the boot partition.

I prefer to have the fastest drives as data storage, since that's where the biggest slowdowns that I can detect occur in my systems. My systems process programs quite effectively and have for some time...but data movement is where I really see the advantages of having SATA over PATA.

Since I move my files around a lot and do video-editing/rendering and moving of same...my arrangement suits me.

I don't game and I see no particular advantage to anyone wanting a "faster" system partition.

Louis

believe it or not the hard drive boot up speed makes a huge difference if your dual booting or just plain want performance...but if your not doing a lot of high performance stuff, using IDE as a boot wouldnt be a huge slow down.

LOL...I don't game...I don't overclock. Neither arouses one whit of interest for me.

What else could be considered "high-performance" on a system owned by a person like me? I've done video-editing and music-editing on every system I've had since Duron 950 CPUs and those 120GB PATA drives .

Louis

hamluis, on Mar 27 2009, 09:59 AM, said:

Yep I had an old Athlon 1200 with an 80gb PATA. That was a good solid workhorse that was retired w/ 14K hours on CPU. *sigh* what a machine.