I had to leave “the cheap” out of the description due to length limits and coolness.
So I had this nice 80 GB SATA hard drive that someone gave me (free). Its average read speed was about 53.7 MB/sec, and it took 32.5 seconds to load Grandville in City of Heroes.
Then I bought a lovely 750 GB SATA II hard drive for $95 on Newegg. Its average read speed is about 73.3 MB/sec, and it takes 24 seconds to load Grandville.
Both of these are disc hard drives, which have acceptable reliability for most purposes.
I’m looking forward to acquiring a 32 GB SATA II Solid State Disk (SSD) drive for $107 (after a $50 mail-in rebate and with $7 shipping) from Newegg. Its max random access read speed (can’t get an average read speed figure yet) is about 175 MB/sec. It should take about 10 seconds to load Grandville on this puppy.
It’s common to find 2,000,000 hour reliability guarantees on SSD drives, as they have no moving parts.
Also, the fastest hard drive I know of, the VelociRaptor, is shown to have about a 102 MB/sec average read speed.
I think it’ll be fun having the best of the best for the first time in my life.
The main complaint about SSD drives is the size…but seriously, why would you bother putting all your photos and other media on a SSD? Personally, I’ve never built a computer with fewer than 2 hard drives. It’s always one for speed and one for size.
okay i have a question about multiple hard drives. I have one now (320 GB) with everything on it (OS included) if I got a new one (like a SSD or raptor) I would want the OS on that one.
Here’s what I’m thinking I should do:
connect new drive
disconnect old drive
put in vista
set boot disk to CD drive
run the setup
and now I’m stuck with 2 hard drives each with their own OS’s installed on them… do i delete system32 from my old one or what? I’m confused…
Yeah, you could just delete the WINDOWS folder from one. That wouldn’t remove everything, but it’d be close enough… You’d have to make sure that you make your other one the master drive first though, so it boots the OS from the right disk. I recommend you figure out how to do that before you try and remove the OS from any drive.
Or you can download a GParted LiveCD and burn it to a CD and clone your original partition onto the new hard drive, assuming that the new one is bigger than or as big as the old one.
It doesn’t matter if you have multiple operating systems on multiple hard drives, though. My computer has Windows XP Home, Windows XP Pro, Windows XP Pro x64, and Debian Linux on it, and probably has a few copies of that last one among the 3 separate hard drives.