Dual Harddrives with my HP?

Im looking at an HP dv9500t. it has a free upgrade from 80GB HDD to Dual 120GB HDD's (240GB Total). I have heard that dual HDD's will my PC hotter,louder,slower, and heavier. are these things true? How much heavier?

Slower boot up?:have to boot up or start 2 drives, double the time
hotter?:well, double HDD's double heat right?
louder?:double HDD's double noise right?
heavier?: of course, but by how much?
Less battery? of course, double HDD's double power, but how much time off my battery is that?

this is with no RAID, just dual HDD's

Thanks for the help in advance!

EDIT: also, the extra space is really unnesasary (all i need is 80GB)

 

my advice is flog both of them on ebay and put the money towards one or two of these babys http://www.storagereview.com/HTS722020K9A00.sr

will it be slower cos u have to drives : no ..it depends on how fast the drive is that windows is installed on

hotter : not much really

louder : nope

heavier : only very very slightly

less battery : noticable drop in battery life i couldnt say how much though but it stands to reason

 

You can take the worst case scenario for the drive which is 5watts.

Assuming you have a 80-85 watt battery which is pretty standard for machines of that size or it maybe 55-60 assuming it's undersized.

The average machine that size sucks 18-30watts depending load. Around 14 on pure idle, 18 watts word and winamp idle, 30 watts DVD load.

Under DVD you'll get a little over 2.5 hours with an 85watter tack on an extra 5 watts and you'll lose about 25 mins max. Which assumes that the second drive is busy for the whole time.

There's an advantage to having a second drive. If you're in to video editing, you can rip or edit video on the second drive without slowing your system down to a crawl. Harddrives in laptops aren't as good as desktop drives at handling HIGH I/O requests and if you're ripping a DVD you can expect to LAG badly.

Also you can run your swap file on the second drive for better performance.

IMO it's a tough choice either to sell it or not. You can keep it for the above reasons. Or you can do something cool like run software RAID 0. Tricky to set up but possible using some imaging software.

Or just sell both and get a single Seagate 7200.7 250Gig.

 

There are programs that make RAID possible? I didn't know that. Which RAID? do they cost money? Thanks

 

It's technically free... If you run XP.

Google XP software RAID.

 

what about with Vista?