3

Possible Duplicate:
Should I put my operating system on my fast drive or my slow drive?

I just check the spec of my new drive and old drive, currently I am using the old drive as OS, here is the comparison:

old: 320GB, 7200rpm, 16mb cache new: 1TB, 7200rpm, 32mb cache

If I reinstall the OS with the new drive, will I feel a significant boost of speed?

And if I don't do that, Let say:

Scenario 1: I use the new drive to store some video only, then I play these movie, they are reading from the new drive, but does the old drive matters? Because the old drive are the OS.

Scenario 2: I use the new drive to install games only, then I play these games, they are reading from the new drive, but does the old drive matters? Because the old drive are the OS.

Community
  • 1
lamwaiman1988
  • 2,791

2 Answers2

1

It will make a difference, but not one that you'll notice since the speed of both drives are the same. The cache is larger and will make a difference but not a huge one.

In scenario one, the movies will use the speed from the new drive, the OS Drive will just use the old drive since it's only on the disk.

Scenario two, the games will have the same effect as on scenario one.

If you want a noticeable speed boost I would've gone for:

  • SSD for OS and selected programs.
  • 7200rpm, 32MB Cache for data
Sandeep Bansal
  • 6,452
1

From personal experience I can say that going from an old 250GB drive to a 1TB drive resulting in a performance boost, for me at least.

In theory you should get a performance increase as the 1TB drive has a much higher data density than the 320GB drive and so raw data transfer speeds from the drive should be higher.

Doing a couple of benchmarks I found that my 250GB drive was capable of around 50-60MiB/s data transfer while the 1TB managed about 100MiB/s. This may or may not be a noticeable boost, it depends on how you use your system..

As always though this depends on your old and new drive types, a "budget" 1TB drive may not be as fast as a Western Digital "Raptor" 250GB drive...

Mokubai
  • 95,412