new 300 gig sata hard drive -suggestions

hey guys, im about to get a new seagate barracuda 300 gig sata hard drive, and i wanted to ask for some suggestions:

i am currently running windows on an 80 gig ide drive that ive had about 5 years. my question is, would i gain a noticeable performance increase, by running windows on the new 300 gig sata? if so, i can always use a partition migrating program to port my c: partition to the new hard disk, and i imagine its not tough to set the hard drive to boot from in the bios, though i've never done it. if i wouldnt gain any performance, it'd be easier i guess just to tack the new drive on as a secondary data disk and keep using the ide 80 gig for windows.

im looking for recommendations/advice on this, thanks in advance

 

Hello chrome_sturmen.

Is this a SATA150 or SATA300 drive? And how much Mbs of cache does it have? Anyway, I suppose it is faster then your 80Gb (ATA?) and you will gain a noticable performance by putting WinXP on SATA.

Cheers

 

hey thanks for the input - its a sata 3.0, but my motherboard only supports 1.5 i think, so it would be running for now at that lesser speed. i think it has a 16mb cache. i dont run xp btw, but server 2003, but i guess thats neither here nor there. well if i'll gain in performance, i guess its worth it to spend the time migrating the windows partition onto the new sata drive, i wonder how long it'll take to copy about a fifty gig partition, overnight at least, im sure?

 

Hello again.

SATA150 is SATA1. They use tranfer rates of 150Mb/s, and SATA300 is the same as SATA2 and they use 300Mb/s. If your 80Gb drive is Maxtor, then it's most probably ATA133, which means it uses 133Mb/s, if it's ATA100 (WD), th3n 100Mb/s, and so on. As you see, not much diference in speed from ATA133 and SATA150, but I would anyway use SATA for whatever OS.

 

Personally, I would use the 80gb harddisk for Windows + Applications and the 300gb harddisk for personal data.

 

erik, what would influence you to make that choice? i admit, it certainly would be the easier solution, since then i wouldnt have to migrate my operating system partition to the new drive. i have a 150 gig sata with two partitions, one for mp3s (50 gigs) and one for all other data (100 gigs) and its full, so even as it stands im gonna need to migrate that mp3 partition over to the new drive to make room for more general data on the first 150 gig drive, and so i'll have room to encode the rest of my mp3s on the new. moving that mp3 partition is really enough partition migrating for me without also needing to move the operating system partition. still, if i were to gain performance, id consider doing it

 

I just don't like the idea, that my data is on the system partition, which is quite a "dangerous" partition.
My system partition isn't important to me, my personal data is important, because it represents all my hard work for years.
My personal data requires also more backup, than my system partition.
System and data are two different worlds IMO and they need another approach.

I also have two harddisks : system and data and an external harddisk for backup.
It gives me a very reassuring feeling, that my data is stored on another harddisk/partition, especially when something terrible happens on my system partition and it gives me total freedom on my system partition, if I want to change it completely without being worried about my personal data.

Of course many users like to have everything on one harddisk, after all most computers have only one harddisk, but that doesn't mean, I have to do this.

I think you are looking for better performance, I can't give you any advice on that. My knowledge is too small.
I have two WD Raptors (80gb) and a fast computer, so it doesn't make a difference on which harddisk, I install system or data.

 

two wd raptors 80gb you must have some money or where you proritys lie.

 

You probably wouldn't be able to see the performance gain in every day use if you put you Os on the Sata. Like ErikAlbert suggested you would be better off leaving the Os on the 80gb and all of your personal stuff on the new Sata. The Sata's are faster but not that much.

 

Fastest Sata drive only does approx 90mb/s MAX (Newest Raptor), so currently no need for anything faster than Sata 1

 

That is just a personal choice, I would still separate my system and data, with any type of harddisk, but I need two harddisks, not one.
Besides I'm not the only one at Wilders, who decided to separate their data from their system partition.
Before I had this setup, each time when something happened on my only harddisk, I panicked, OMG my data, my data, my data.
Now I don't even care when something happens on my system partition.

My first goal was to recover my computer as fast as possible and with a minimum of knowledge and two type of softwares made that possible :
1. Image Backup (Acronis True Image Home)
2. Immediate System Recovery (FirstDefense-ISR)
I recover my system partition in no time and I'm still polishing it to do this even better.

My second goal is to protect my on-line snapshot, because my off-line snapshot has no problems. Right now I'm working on that. I'm not in a hurry, because malware won't disappear on the internet.

 

i know that it is best to separate data from system and will do on my new pc.
my new pc will have one internal harddrive and on external drive
the internal drive will be like 80gb or 120gb and external will be 250gb so i can store more than one image and more than one copy of my documents on it. probaly weekly backup of system and my docs
i was mainly commenting on the fact you can afford two raptor 80gb harddrives.
lodore