I have two hard drives. Which should I use?

I bought a laptop way back in December of 2008 and it came with a WD3200BEVT in it, then in October of 2009 I bought a WD5000BEVT and put it in the second HDD bay in my laptop. I just bought my first SSD, which I'm excited about, but now I'm not sure which HDD I should use alongside my SSD. Space isn't an issue at all, as I don't have all that much stuff.

Two questions for ya:

1. which drive do you think I should use?
2. I've noticed a clicking sound coming from at least one of the drives (it's not always there, but sometimes it clicks like crazy), but I don't know which one. Does that mean one of them may be going bad?

Thank you for your advice!

 

If space isn't an issue, why bother with the auxiliary drive at all?

That being said, I think those two drives are going to be similar enough such that you won't notice any difference between the two save for the difference in capacity, so there isn't really a should or shouldn't (assuming one isn't actually going bad).

 

Seems to me that the logical move is to use the larger-capacity, newer drive. If you want, you can buy an external HDD enclosure to use the other one as an external drive. If you notice the clicking after installing the SSD, you could try swapping the HDD's and see if that makes any difference. Clicking isn't a certain sign of HDD failure, but it could potentially mean that something has gone wrong with the moving parts of one or both of the drives. At the very least, it's a bit annoying.

 

I'd say use the 5000BEVT - it's faster. The clicking is because of the heads parking - on WD's it happens every 8 seconds by default, and the 3200BEVT is a lot louder, as well.

 

This is what I plan on doing.

One thing you could do is use the larger drive in an external as a backup drive for the other two. Of course I don't know how big the SSD is.

 

My advice.. Figure out which one is "clicking" and trash it.