Crazy upgrade idea? Or actually not that bad?

So lately I've been posting about upgrading my hard drive, and I finally came up with this zany idea of having the two hard drives for the Sony be:

1.) A 7200rpm Seagate 7200.4 500Gb, whenever that comes out.

2.) A second, slower, 5400rpm 500Gb.

The plan here is to put all the music programs (just the programs) on the 7200rpm along with Windows, my music, and all that other jazz, while the sample libraries of the music programs, if possible, are kept on the slower 5400rpm (except for the Native Instruments stuff, which will be transfered from its temporary home to the 7200rpm after I get it). So basically, necessary or intensive stuff on the 7200rpm, and junk like Reason refills, and the VST library on the 5400rpm.

Reason for this is, my 250gb external just went kaput, and I direly need the extra storage space. If I can get that external back online, I'll go back to the original scheme of two 500gb 7200rpms.

 

Or get a 32 GB SSD and put windows and the programs on that, and then a 500 GB drive for files?

 

Could work, but SSD is hellishly expensive for the sort of space I need.

Next question. So would a 5400rpm 2.5" internal 500gb run about as fast as my Seagate Freeagent 250gb external (taking into account USB and all that, would it be much slower, or about the same write speed, ect).

 

A 500GB internally would be much faster then a 250GB external drive. The 500GB should have a max speed of about 80MB/s average while your 250GB is limited to 60MB/s by USB in perfect conditions. I don't think a drive of that size is that fast anyways, and USB won't always (ever) give you 60MB/s.

 

You'll be lucky with 30MB/s on USB.

 

Yep USB is maxxed out around 30mb/s

 

You will not get 80MB/s average with an internal HDD. 40MB/s is more reasonable and yes it will be faster than external.

 

Right now, the 320 GB, 7200 RPM internal drives are getting 60 MB/s, give or take a few megabytes. The 500 GB ones (two platter) should be a little faster, but not 80 MB/s. 65 seems reasonable, 70 would be a nice surprise.

A 5400 RPM, 500 GB one should get better than 40 MB/s, perhaps 45-50 MB/s.

So long as you aren't thinking of putting these different speed drives in RAID0, sounds like a good idea.

 

You seem waaaaaaay to generous with those numbers dude!

About 65MB/s for a 500GB internally is what you should get with todays 2.5" drives (5400rpm). Slightly slower and almost the same as todays 7200rpm 320GB drives (65MB/s) some up to 70MB/s.

(for example my WD Black Scorpio 320GB 7200rpm 16MB is doing 68MB/s average read/write, 87MB/S max and 40MB/s min, seektimes of ~15.7ms)

And through USB you should get no more than 30MB/s if you're lucky.