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?
i think this article right here could be useful. Super Power Your Laptop with a SSD Double Swap!
would you say your computer is slow?
if not.. then don’t upgrade!
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!
Consider this light reading:
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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.
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 
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.
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?
Hey djnesquigs, do you find 60GB is enough for the OS and Apps? I really wanna do the upgrade but 120GB is to much for me so I was thinking about doing 60GB but i’m running with Traktor 2 and Maschine. I just wouldn’t want to run into the issue of always having to move stuff to the storage HD because of lack of SSD space.
to me it seems like cost + file management + loss in battery life wouldn’t be worth the little extra speed.
its always nice to have things running faster than usual, but I’m not to sure its worth it
..speaking for myself of course!
in this case, taking dj Nesquigs’ route and addig a small ssd + a big slow hdd is the most cost effective way to go about speeding up your computer
60 GB is too small for me. I use Adobe Suite and two major 3D software packages along with Machine/TP and to a lesser extent Ableton. 60 GB is pushing it space wise and I don’t see more than a 2 year shelf life for that size as a main HD (for me anyway). SSD are now becoming more frequent options for laptop consumers and is likely a harbinger of reduced cost in the next year or so. Plus as the SSD becomes more mainstream technological bumps will become ironed out.
If you’re wanting an upgrade for shits and giggles i’d say wait it out a bit. But if your performance has deteriorated with software updates and a quick fix is critical then perhaps a 60GB+HDD combo can breath new life into a laptop getting long in the tooth.
EDIT:
What are your laptop specs?
Yes, 60gigs is more than enough. i have all my apps/OS on the ssd, as well as some music (not much) and the rest is on the HD in the optibay… and im at maybe 50 gigs? — not planning on putting much more on there.
ill say it again, best money ive spent. upped the ram from 2-4 gigs when i did it too… the only thing that takes a while to load is itunes (which has a 110gig library to populate) yet traktor loads all the same songs in about a min.
do it up. its worth it. and come a yr or so when SSD tech is more mainstream and cheaper… you could prob pop a nice 250gig (or more) into it for cheap(er than now).
If 60GB SSD is not big enough, you might want to consider a hybrid SSD.
Seagate Momentus XT 500GB
This is a 500GB 7200 RPM HD with a 4GB NAND Flash in front of the HD.
The technology ‘preloads’ the most used data bits onto the flash space for faster load up times. It learns what to pre-load over time.
I was playing WoW Cataclysm on my Alienware M11x R1 with a regular 7200rpm HD. I installed on of these Momentus XT and saw a big increase in load times of the OS and the game. My FPS jumped also in game. Windows 7 went from 45sec load time to 23sec, WoW load times in busy zones was 50% faster.
I now use this M11x as my Traktor 2 laptop connected to my Denon MC6000. I have yet to ‘max’ out its performance. No drops, no crashes, no blips…nothing. As long as songs have already been beat-gridded, I have almost instant load of those songs onto my decks.
I can not say what increase I am getting with this hybrid SSD, since I didn’t start my Traktor Pro 2 use on a normal HDD, but if my WoW play is any indication, its a huge improvement.
My Dell Alienware M11x is an Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 w/4GB memory.
My Denon MC6000 has customized mapping that allows me to load 2 decks/2 sampler decks and 4 FX tabs w/3 FX effects each; 8 cue points and 8 48sec samples.
