Replace IDE With SATA II?

[Rick1486]

Hi everyone,

I've currently got one 160gb IDE drive in my main p.c. and have just bought two 500gb SATA II internal drives. At the moment there's basically little more than WinXP home, Office and a couple of games on the system as I knew I'd be getting additional drives.

My question for you gurus is this - would I be better off just adding the two SATA drives to the existing system, giving me three drives in total whereby I could say just use the original drive for Windows and install everything else onto the other drives, or would it be better to take the IDE drive out of the equation and start afresh just using the SATA drives and donate the IDE drive to my son's system?
Would I see a performance improvement through adopting any particular approach, should I RAID and if so what would you recommend 0 or 1 etc?
Hope you can help.
Cheers
Rick

[Boon72]

it really depends what you want to use your pc for.

raid 1 = will ensure you dont lose any data if a drive fails (500mb)
raid 0 = uses both drives to act as 1 (1TB)

if you just add them then you could use them as storage, like you say.

but if you want a clean fresh install, then give up the 160gb and just put them in as 2 satas.

[Rick1486]

Thanks for the quick reply.

The truth is it's going to be mainly for gaming, internet browsing & of course using the Office software so with that in mind what do you think?

Cheers
Rick

[Boon72]

to be honest, i'd dump the 160 n go with the 2 sata's as normal drives - 1 with the OS on (partitioned something like say 45gb / 420gb) and then the other as storage.

[Rick1486]

Cheers mate much appreciated.

Rick

[badbob]

I'd still leave the 160GB drive in there, still useful for whatever data you have. I've got a 80GB drive with my games patches on it.

[Rick1486]

What would you do with the 160gb though, would you leave it with just the OS on and get rid of everything else onto the sata drives or would you do a new install of the OS onto one of the sata drives as suggested above?

Cheers
Rick

[EndlessWaves]

I don't think it makes much difference any way you do it so just organise them in a way you find useful. Perhaps you could put the OS and anything problematic on the 160GB drive for ease of nuking when it needs a reinstall.

As to raid,

Raid 1:
Halfs your capacity (since you're duplicating every file) and slows down file writing but saves you the day of restoring your data in the event of a hard drive death. You still need to back up properly since it won't do anything about something that destroys your computer or both hard drives (fire, surge, theft etc.)

Raid 0: Somewhat maligned I've always thought. You do loose all your data when one hard drive fails but even without it you're going to be restoring data from a backup when a hard drive fails, it just means you're restoring twice as much this way. Raid 0 improves the speed of file reading in some cases.

Both are fun to experiment with, but neither are a must have.

[Rick1486]

Thanks for the replies - the more I think about it the less inclined I am to go down the RAID route, I'll probably just use the whole 1tb of extra storage I've now got. Still not sure what to do with the old drive though - if I keep it for say the OS will it slow my system down as it's an IDE drive and the new ones are SATA?

Cheers
Rick

[badbob]

No keep the 160GB in there, it won't slow anything down. Run HD tach on each one, and see how much slower the 160GB drive is. You could use the 160GB for anything really, music, videos, patches, software etc. So the slightly slower speed isn't a concern. 160GB is still a decent size.

[Rick1486]

Ta very much - so is the general concensus then to keep the OS on the 160gb or to move it onto one of the new drives (duly partitioned to allow it only a portion of the available space on the drive)?

I also take it then gang that the IDE channel won't necessarily present a bottleneck in the system - I'm thinking here of throughputs as I understand that the SATA II is 3gb/s.

Cheers
Rick

[badbob]

I wouldn't create multiple partitions on the 500GB as it slows the system down (swapping swap files between partitions) If the 160GB is fast, then I'd install the OS onto that. If not just install onto the 500GB. One drawback is if the OS corrupts you'll have to retreive data from the drive, but that's easily done by booting off a Ubuntu Live CD, copying data across then safe to reinstall.

[EndlessWaves]

Originally Posted by Rick1486

Ta very much - so is the general concensus then to keep the OS on the 160gb or to move it onto one of the new drives (duly partitioned to allow it only a portion of the available space on the drive)?

I also take it then gang that the IDE channel won't necessarily present a bottleneck in the system - I'm thinking here of throughputs as I understand that the SATA II is 3gb/s.

Cheers
Rick

Yes, but hard drives themselves can't transfer any significant amount of data at more than 100MB/s.

[Rick1486]

Update for you all. I've installed the 160gb with the other two drives and the ide has the original OS on it. XP found the drives and they duly showed up in disk management, but after initializing them (but before formatting them) the system crashed into a reboot and since then it says it's found new hardware but still keeps crashing before I can do anything about it.

Should I have installed SATA drivers before connecting the new drives into the system or could it be that my current (400w) power supply isn't up to supplying another two drives? Or is there anything else anyone can suggest?

Cheers
Rick