How much of a speed increase would I see from dual hard drives
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  1. #1
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    Default How much of a speed increase would I see from dual hard drives

    Hey everyone so as much as I want to do the SSD upgrade I just can't justify the price per GB right now. So I'm wondering how much of a speed increase would I see from doing the optibay upgrade but with another HD for just
    Music and large file storage and keeping my main HD as a os and system file drive?

  2. #2
    Über Tech Guru Ed Paris's Avatar
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    i think this article right here could be useful. http://www.djtechtools.com/2011/03/2...d-double-swap/
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  3. #3
    amidoinitrite
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    would you say your computer is slow?
    if not.. then don't upgrade!

  4. #4
    Tech Guru Garygary1's Avatar
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    Putting in another hard drive that is dedicated to the os will not noticeably increase performance. However, putting the 2 hard drives into a raid configuration will help a lot with performance, especially if your computer's bottleneck is its hard drive

  5. #5
    amidoinitrite
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    Quote Originally Posted by Garygary1 View Post
    Putting in another hard drive that is dedicated to the os will not noticeably increase performance. However, putting the 2 hard drives into a raid configuration will help a lot with performance, especially if your computer's bottleneck is its hard drive
    so 2 disks act as 1?
    as oppose to 2 separate drives?

    who does that work?
    I'm quite intrigued now.
    before I was just thinking of it as a faster external drive inside your computer!

  6. #6
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    Consider this light reading:

    [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID"]RAID - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:RAID_0.svg" class="image" title="RAID Level 0"><img alt="RAID Level 0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9b/RAID_0.svg/100px-RAID_0.svg.png"@@AMEPARAM@@commons/thumb/9/9b/RAID_0.svg/100px-RAID_0.svg.png[/ame]

    Adding another hard drive to your desktop/laptop configuration can be very tricky. In a laptop, you will need to have the internal spare bay; if you don't have hardware raid controller then you have to settle for the Windows RAID software, which is very limited. Windows RAID software will only be able to extend your drive space and make your system look like two drives are acting as one mega dynamic drive; not really giving you a performance increase

    If your laptop or desktop has a raid controller (or you purchase one for your desktop) then you are in a bit of luck. You can do both level 0 and level 1 raid configurations. RAID 1 is simple, it is for redundancy purposes, information gets copied to both drives. If one drive fails, you can swap to the other drive, reboot it and your system will be back up. There is no performance increase in this RAID 1 structure.

    RAID 0 is called striping. You extend your drive onto two drives, giving yourself a little bit of performance boost but almost doubling your hard drive capacity. This really also is not much of a boost, you are now running two drives at the expense of your limited battery life(if you are on laptop).

    For DJ purposes, you will find you will get performance gains from using a SSD hard drive device. There are no spinning platters to 'seek' your information and you will find that you can extend your battery life of your laptop.

  7. #7
    Tech Guru Garygary1's Avatar
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    yeah, I've never had to set up a raid configuration, but from what i know, there are 2 different types of configs for when you have 2 hdds: raid 1, and raid 0.

    Raid 1: two hard drives acting as clones of one another. if you have two 500 gb hdds and you raid 1 them, they act as one 500 gb drive. Supposedly this is for security, because if one hard drive fails, the other automatically backs it up.

    Raid 0: two hard drives acting as one hard. two 500 gb drives show up as one 1 tb hard drive. the performance gains come with this config because 2 hard drives are looking for the same file. theoretically, its 2x faster than 1 hard drive, though, i'm not sure its that drastic.

    Nooooo, beat me to the punch

  8. #8
    Tech Guru space monkey's Avatar
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    I have Raid 0 set up in my lap top and the performance increase is noticeable but no where near x2. There are a number of technical challenges and overhead to consider. I'd say not worry about setting up a raid and wait until SSD drive costs are more palatable.

  9. #9
    Tech Guru Nesquigs's Avatar
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    ive got a 60 gig ssd in my macbook with a 750gb 7200 rpm WD drive in the optibay and the thing is solid as hell.

    battery life decreases somewhat, but the boost in load time of apps and programs on my macbook is crazy. ableton (which used to take a few min, atleast) to boot up now is less than 10 seconds... everything loaded instantiously. Rebooting is fantastic.

    best money ive spent in a long time, as it extended the life of my macbook a few more years
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  10. #10
    amidoinitrite
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    Quote Originally Posted by djnesquigs View Post
    ive got a 60 gig ssd in my macbook with a 750gb 7200 rpm WD drive in the optibay and the thing is solid as hell.

    battery life decreases somewhat, but the boost in load time of apps and programs on my macbook is crazy. ableton (which used to take a few min, atleast) to boot up now is less than 10 seconds... everything loaded instantiously. Rebooting is fantastic.

    best money ive spent in a long time, as it extended the life of my macbook a few more years
    awesome!

    what do you put on each?
    software on the SSD and everything else on the other?

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