Why dual hard drives?

What are the benefits derived from having dual hard drives? I know the obvious answere is one drive mirroring and backing the other up. Are there performance hits or perfomance jumps? If one drive backs up the other do the drives have to be matched? I ask this because I'm looking at the Falcon MACH V. You can outfit this system with dual 36Gig Raptors running at 10000 RPMs. Why would a gaming/multimedia machine need dual HDs? If there is advantages then would it be more advantageous to match the speedy Raptor HD with a beefier (say 120 Gig Maxtor) HD.

1000rpm? Don't you mean 10,000?

i think you may get some performance gain from having a raid 0 (striping) configuration. although in the unlikelyhood that one drive fails, things can get quite messy.

I run duel raptors and you get 80mb trans on raid 0.Please dont flame me I know just enough to be dangerouse.system specs
3.06 canterwood
2048 2x crucial
duel WD raptors
8KNXP intel 875p chip (gigabyte)mobo
and other assorted accesories

Unless you are going to use the harddrives in a RAID configuration, I don't really see too much use for more than one harddrive, as long as the drive is big enough

Just partition it to suit your needs, with a small system partition, which you can back up to a cd/dvd...

If you are going to use RAID, you will see some performance increase with striping (RAID 0), though as has been said before, if one of your drives dies/gets corrupted, all your data is gone...

A safer setup would be RAID 0+1, which is striping and mirroring, as if one drive fails, you've got a backup...
But this again requires at least 4 drives, and thus increases the price...



A gaming/multimedia machine don't really need RAID, as the perfomance increase isn't that big generally...
(If you were going to run a very big database on the other hand.....)

In your case, I'd got with the Maxtor, as 36 GB isn't very much space these days...

.02$

OK, so why are top end gaming machines being equipped with dual drives? Because they can?

coz IDE hard drives are cheap...and most boards support some form of RAID nowadays, so its just as easy to offer it as a solution

After reading the above posts "what is raid?" the reason behind putting the system in high end machines is definately consumer driven. Either for the security of having a redundant format (raid 1) or for eeking out that last little bit of performance (raid 0). I should've read that before posting my question.

Heh, i know nothing about this raid stuff...
I started out with a 60 gig partitioned in half... and decided to get an 80 gig with an 8 meg cache for gaming and multimedia... it's working out well...

I find it hard to believe that no one thinks about resource sharing anymore... That USED to be #1 thought when designing a PC.

With hard drives and cache for instance, 2 hard drives with 8 meg cache EACH, will feed information MUCH faster to the CPU.

Allocating a large fixed disk cache/virtual memory, to it's own partition in drive 2, while reading windows and gaming data from drive 1 makes the things much faster...

Now take some time to imagine how best to allocate resources between 2 drives, and post on THAT!

This is true, but it doesn't half screw things up if you use Drive Image, or Ghost, to back up your drive. When you come to restore that image, Windows will refuse to load as your page file will be missing (assuming drive 2 doesn't exist, or has moved). Its much better to leave things alone, and add enough memory to avoid disk caching in the first place.

Osl200

this program works as your pc boots it gives you a choice of hd's to boot from
its simple and easy to use....a no brainer

cardpopper@hotmail.com
its an exe program file so i cant upload it
it scans virus free from mcafee

The correct name is OSL2000
Get it free from http://www.osloader.com/