Bought 2nd HDD - which drive should I put my system on?

[Unfocused]

I have had only one 640GB HDD in my PC up until today when my new 2TB HDD has arrived.

Since the new HDD seems to have better overall performance - will I benefit from cloning my system partition to the new HDD and running my system from the new 2TB drive?

I'm attaching benchmark results (read) of both drives. Admittedly, I don't know much about HDD performance etc.

640GB:


2TB:

 

[Vegeta897]

Unsure answer: the difference probably isn't worth the trouble
Sure answer: get an SSD

 

[Ikagara]

Generally from what I understand people get smaller fast SSD's putting their system on that and attaching slower larger as storage for games, documents, movies, ect.

In your case the 2tb does preform better, but larger HDD (above 1tb) tend to have higher failure rates then smaller HDD. Do you already have an external backup drive? If not you could use the 2tb for your system and then use the 640gb as a backup drive.

 

[Krynn72]

will I benefit from cloning my system partition to the new HDD and running my system from the new 2TB drive?

Nope. There may be a performance increase, but you won't benefit, you'll just kill your drive faster.

 

[nico]

Performance differences would be negligible. You're better off with a small SSD for your system drive and use the larger ones as datastores. You can mess around with outer and inner data writing on physical disks, but again there's very little benefit apart from sequential reads increasing slightly. Nothing beats an SSD hosting your OS =)

 

[YROC]

I have a question, but didn't feel like making another thread with this one being somewhat on topic. If windows is installed on C: (the main drive), should I remove my secondary drive if I plan to install a fresh copy of windows? The secondary drive contains tons of audio, video, images. Does installing new windows remove anything from your backup (secondary) HDDs?

 

[Krynn72]

I have a question, but didn't feel like making another thread with this one being somewhat on topic. If windows is installed on C: (the main drive), should I remove my secondary drive if I plan to install a fresh copy of windows? The secondary drive contains tons of audio, video, images. Does installing new windows remove anything from your backup (secondary) HDDs?

When you go to install windows, it pretty obviously distinguishes between drives. You need to manually select which one to remove the partition(s) from and reformat, so as long as you're paying attention its hard to mess it up. That said, if I'm working on someone's business computer which multiple drives, I usually disconnect the sata cable just to prevent any "not paying attention" mistakes. If its a concern, and you have a lot to lose, just play it safe. Takes all of like 10 seconds to unplug it (don't bother removing it obviously, just disconnect it temporarily).