hey guys whats the point of 2 hard drives?
hey guys whats the point of 2 hard drives?
Well, it depends on personal choice. Some people like to RAID 0 two drives for speed. Some like to install OS and programs on one and data such as pictures, movies, documents on the other. Some like to use the second one for backup. As for me, I have 3, I RAID 0 two of them which acting like one drive and use the other one for back up. There may be other options I couldn't think of it right of bed.
That's a couple of options. I have more to add to this though....
You can also move the pagefile to a separate drive which helps speeds things up.
With today's speeds you don't as much of an improvement - however, *enabling* additional drives while keeping the original does give you even more benefit, for it seems to use both drives simultaneously, sort of like a mini RAID for pagefile.
Now, for my explanation.
I always install all my OSs onto one of my 2 Seagate 500 GB 7200.11 HDs - the other holds *all* of my data - my Downloads folder, my contacts folder, my favorites, my Documents, my Mozilla profiles, my Music, etc.
The kewl thing abut this is that when I want to reinstall Vista, or install a new OS, or even an old OS, I install it the the first drive, and then point all the existing folders in the OS to the folders on the new drive - so, right now I could theoretically have Vista 32bit, Vista 64bit, Windows 7 32bit and Windows 7 64bit all installed on the first drive. All my 'data' for lack of a better word, is on the second drive. After some finagling, I get all 4 OSs set up so that Firefox in each one is using the same profile from the second drive, and each OS is set to see the D:\Downloads folder as my Downloads, and D:|Documents as my Documents - this provides uniformity in that o matter which OS I boot into I see the same location for saving a download, or opening a music file to listen to, etc.
To get an idea on how to *move* your Special Folders, see
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/107990-personal-user-shell-folders-move-location.html
A couple of other good tutorials related that you might want to read are
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/90705-personal-user-shell-folders.html and
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/148461-personal-user-folder-restore-missing-folder.html in case something gets messed up in the whole process.
Now, This seems kewl at first, until you realize that keeping your data on the same drive, and in the same partition, as your OS can be very very bad - because if your OS goes South, and you have to format, and you cannot access the partition to get your data, means you lose your data when you perform the format. My method allows for you to format the main drive as many times as you want - your data is still preserved on the second drive.
Other options for dual / multiple drives can also be to use identical drives so you keep everything on one drive and use a backup solution to the other drive.
Some people prefer this to having to use my method, but what I like about my method is that, using Mozilla Apps, such as Firefox and Thunderbird, I install the app, don't run it the firs time, then run the app with a -Profilemanager switch added (IOW Firefox -Profilemanager or Thunderbird -Profilemanager) and use the profile manager to tell it where my current profile(s) is(are). In a matter of 10 - 20 seconds I have my app back up *exactly* as it was the last time I used it before formatting my drive and installing Vista / Windows 7 all over again.