Hard Drive Question

[Trendkill]

Is there a difference between using one 120 Gig HD, and using three 40 Gig HD's? Does it slow down your machine any?

 

[johnjkr1]

If you try to use all three at once, it would slow down. Only one IDE device per channel can be accessed at a time. So if you had two hard drives going full blast on the same channel, it would slow down quite a bit.

 

[Tash]

I think that 3 drives would definitely be faster. A single drive would be thrashing if two programs were accessing it at once, or a file copy is being performed. Whereas with two drives, the heads can sit where they need to and not move much for sequencial reads. Even tho if they are on the same channel, data transfer can only occur with one drive at a time, the time saving would be that head movement would be minimal. Also, a command to one drive to initiate a head movement can be performed, and then go to the other drive to do a read or write if its head is correctly positioned.