[Tesladin]

I have a seagate 160gb ST3160812A as my computers master drive. I just bought a western digital WD20EARS 2.0 tb hard drive. Just wondering if i should switch my os to the new drive because it's faster? I think the seagate has 8mb cache and the western has 64mb cache. does this make a difference?

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Hi Tesladin,

If you put your OS on the larger drive the smaller drive would not be much good for storage so you would have both the OS and storage on the same drive, (even if you created a storage partition). This is inefficient.

I would install your new drive as your storage drive and keep your existing for the OS. You can than optimise your first drive to make your system more responsive. When you have the new drive installed move the My Documents folder to it. Restart the computer.

The following tutorial was written for SSD drives but works for other drives.
> http://forum.corsair...ad.php?p=462026 If you are not happy turning off hibernation, just skip it.

When you have ever thing set up you might consider creating a small recovery partition on the new drive where you can keep an image of the C drive.

Let us know how you get on.

[iammykyl]

Hi Tesladin,

If you put your OS on the larger drive the smaller drive would not be much good for storage so you would have both the OS and storage on the same drive, (even if you created a storage partition). This is inefficient.

I would install your new drive as your storage drive and keep your existing for the OS. You can than optimise your first drive to make your system more responsive. When you have the new drive installed move the My Documents folder to it. Restart the computer.

The following tutorial was written for SSD drives but works for other drives.
> http://forum.corsair...ad.php?p=462026 If you are not happy turning off hibernation, just skip it.

When you have ever thing set up you might consider creating a small recovery partition on the new drive where you can keep an image of the C drive.

Let us know how you get on.

[Samm]

Welcome to G2G Tesladin

The answer to your question to a certain extent is a matter of opinion. Mine happens to differ from iammykyl's but that doesn't necessarily make mine the correct one. However, this is what I would do:

I would use the new drive as the primary drive and install the operating system on it because it is faster.
However, I would divide it into two or more partitions. You are not going to need 2TB for windows etc, so I would create a windows partition and use the remaining space for other things. EG You could create a partition that just contains My Documents folders etc. You may wish to have a partition to use just for downloads. You get the general idea.

I would then use the older, smaller drive as a backup drive. e.g. after performing a fresh installation of Windows to the new drive and having loaded the essentials, such as drivers & basic software, you could create an image of the C drive and store on the second drive to make recovery easier in the future. This works even better if your documents & downloads etc are stored on a separate partition as they don't then get overwritten in the recovery process. You could also use the second drive to keep a backup copy of your important files & documents, that way if one drive fails, you have a copy of the important stuff on the other drive.

[Kemasa]

As an added thought, I have the same exact drive and used it for a bit as the system drive for a Linux system. I noticed that the system "paused" from time to time. Long story short, I copied all of the data to another WD disk, but a non-green version, and the system is running MUCH faster and there are no longer any "pauses".

My point is that the specs are not the whole story and there are issues with the green drives, not just what I had happen. This disk works well as a storage disk, but I would not use it as a system disk. It may just be due to issues with my specific system. I have seen warnings that this drive could have issues in some external enclosures.