I have a slot for a 2nd hard drive in my notebook

My HP dv9700 came with 1 hard drive but has a slot for a 2nd. What would I gain from installing a 2nd drive?

 

more space, depending on the speed/size of you old one and speed/size of the new one you could get a faster one, if you get an SSD you will have a super snappy computer with fast loads (this is what i'm gonna get), you could set them up in RAID0 (better performance less reliabilty) or RAID1 (second hard drive that backs up your data)

 

more storage space. choise to have one performant disk (ssd if you're crazy) and one big for data.

option for raid0 for speed or raid1 for savety.

lots of options.

 

Sorry to show my ignorance, but what is SSD, and whay is RAID 1 safer thar RAID 2?

 

An SSD is a Solid State Drive, which uses flash memory rather than a spinning hard drive. It is faster, more energy efficient, and more reliable, using no moving parts. However, it is substantially more expensive and has less capacity, though the prices are going down.

RAID 0 splits the data being written to both hard drives. This results in Windows seeing 1 hard drive that is double the speed, double the capacity. However, if 1 hard drive fails, it's all gone.

RAID 1 is a true RAID setup (RAID standing for Redundant Array of Independent Disks), as it really is redundant. Data is written to both hard drives. Therefore, if one hard drive fails, you have another one for back up. However, you'll have no increase in either HDD space or speed.

There's also the JBOD route (Just a Bunch of Disks). Windows will see 2 separate drives.

 

nobody mentioned RAID2.

SSD is solid state disk (flash memory instead of disks)

RAID0 combines your hard drives and is meant to improves performance

RAID1 "mirrors" your hard drives making every write on both HDD's so if one fails you have a back up.

use google or search tool if you want more info

 

DOES NOT double speed! improves performance but not double...

 

it does double read and write speed. not random access speed.

 

Most controllers today can double the transferspeeds in RAID0 without any problems, especially the intel matrix controller (ICHxR).
Accesstime will stay the same though or get .Xms slower though.

 

A second drive will give you more space.. But I just use an external usb drive. This way I can store it when Im not using it.

 

If you put in another drive it will as said give you more space, how much depends on what HDD you get, you can get upto 500GB extra.

It gives you more portabillity than having an external one, as you don't have to carry an external drive with you at all times and it is faster tranferspeeds than an external (if you don't have eSATA and buy an external eSATA HDD).

Though it will decrease your batterytime depending on how long it lasts now, it could be anything from 5 to 30mins.


btw jjgoo, in your sign it says w/DataBurst Cache, every mechanical HDD has it, so it's nothing special It's just a marketing for dell to make buyers think it's anything special.

 

Oh and make sure you have a mounting bracket for the hard drive.

 

dv9700 doesnt support hardware raid so the extra HD can only be used for extra space.