are 2 hard drives with no raid faster than 1?

[nizzy1115]

I have 2 200 gig hard drives (ata133 7200 rpm 8mg cash). in simple terms, would putting the os on one drive and and other files like music/videos etc on the other actually increase the speed of the computers read/write? My question is because they are both ide on the same cable. Does the cable limit the amount of data going through so its really not benificial? Thanks!

[goldeagle2005]

The only time such a setup would help much would be when there are read/write operations going on both the hard drives simultaneously. Anyway, a RAID 0 setup will provide a much better performance.
Also, if you have just the two hard drives and no optical drives, you could connect each hard drive to an independent channel. If you have an Optical Drive(s), connect the hard drives on the primary channel, and the ODD on the second channel.

[nizzy1115]

The only time such a setup would help much would be when there are read/write operations going on both the hard drives simultaneously. Anyway, a RAID 0 setup will provide a much better performance.
Also, if you have just the two hard drives and no optical drives, you could connect each hard drive to an independent channel. If you have an Optical Drive(s), connect the hard drives on the primary channel, and the ODD on the second channel.

Yeah i understand that all and i do have 2 rom drives also. Anyways i do read and write alot to both drives at the same time, but i was wondering that obviously 2 drives are faster than 1, but does the ide cable connecting both harddrives limit the ammount of bandwidth available to both drives (like cut it in half for each drive) so the difference would be negalbe?

[alc6379]

Running the drives in a RAID on the same IDE channel might hurt things, actually. If you wanted to do that approach, you'd want them on independant channels, preferably an IDE RAID card.

Truth be told, I've seen benchmarks that indicate RAID 0 is not really that big of a performance booster for desktop usage. For that 1-3% increase in read/write speed you're getting, you're putting your self in a data loss position, because if one drive fails, you lose the data on both the drives with a RAID 0.

Personally, I just run with 2 drives. I install Windows on one drive, and keep all my applications on it. Then, I store all of my data on another drive. My Documents and other types of files I keep where they'd normally be, but I back them up monthly to my second hard drive. (It's just more convenient to leave those documents there for me). If hard drive performance is really an issue for you, consider picking up some Western Digital Raptors, or something fast like that, for your system drive. If you're doing something like video/music editing, where you read or write a lot to your data drive, I'd do the same for it.

[goldeagle2005]

Running the drives in a RAID on the same IDE channel might hurt things, actually. If you wanted to do that approach, you'd want them on independant channels, preferably an IDE RAID card.

Truth be told, I've seen benchmarks that indicate RAID 0 is not really that big of a performance booster for desktop usage. For that 1-3% increase in read/write speed you're getting, you're putting your self in a data loss position, because if one drive fails, you lose the data on both the drives with a RAID 0.

Only 1-2 %? Shock! shock! Whats the advantage of RAID 0 thrn? RAID 5 would be better as it provides for data backup.