AMD Atlon 3200+, 200Gb, add slave HD?

[Union2232]

Im considering adding a slave hard drive on my computer.
Of the 200gb orig hd only 178 was originally available. 8 was restore and 8.5 video memory. (Its a media center pc)
I put 16 gigs on it as MP3s and want to add about 6x more.
I beleive moving this 100 gigs off the main hd onto a slave would keep my computers operating speed from slowing down. I havnt experienced any noticable slowing yet but have had the problem before on a Celeron when it got close to filling up at 80gbs.
The manufactorer (HP) claims the computer wont slow down with all these files on the hd but they didnt strike me as very knowledgable.

 

[Tedster]

If your drive is optimized regularly and you use a good optimizer program on a frequent or automatic basis, then you shouldn't have an problems with speed. Just set the program to run automatically when the fragmentation reaches a certain threshold.

Personally, I never build a computer with less than 2 hard drives. First, I can always back up to the second hard disk, and second, I set my temporary files to write to the second hardrive, thereby decreasing fragmentation on the primary drive.

If you don't want to shell out the money, partition the primary drive into two partitions. You'll only have 1 hard disk, but windows will "see" two. Of course, if you have a major hard drive failure, you may not be able to recover with only one hard disk.

 

[Union2232]

2nd HD

Being its a HP Media Center Computer it has a Personal Media Drive Bay.
This will act as a second harddrive as well as making my files portable.
I hav'nt bought a Media Drive for it yet, as Im still experimenting to see just how large of one I should get.
Ive just about decided a 200gb is best. I need over a hundred to portablize my MP3s alone, and should back up HD there.
Video is something I havnt saved a lot of in the past due to its considerable consumption of space.
Im thinking a second HD for Audio, and a third for Video.
The o/s is actually already configured for many.
2 are actually one (c),
1 is the Personal Media Bay, 4 are usb ports, 1dvd/rw, 1blank?, 2f/ws, and there seems to be no limit to how many can be added.