Which one as a second hard drive?

Hi, I just bought a MSI GT780DXR with two 500 GB (7200 rpm) hard drives in raid 0. I am gonna change one of these for one SSD (crucial M4 128 GB).

In the other hand my current laptop has a momentus xt hard drive (500 GB, 7200 rpm, 4 GB SSD). My question is, if I should put the momentus xt instead one hard dive of the GT780DXR. Perhaps this is not gonna do any difference.

Thank you

 

Use the ssd and one 500 hdd as storage. You will not see a performance increase from the xt if you use it as a storage hdd. Keep it where it is. It will be better for you.

 

A HDD does not 'know' if it is used as an O/S or a storage drive. The XT will give the same performance increase in either case over a standard HDD.

Especially if you move the Users folder to the XT too:

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...rades/608752-hdd-partitioning-help-500gb.html


And even more so if you not only move the Users folder as the above link explains, but also use the initial 100GB of the XT as the D: drive where the Users folder is moved to. The rest of the capacity of the XT can be used as an Archive drive where you move your data that you don't normally change/delete/modify/update once you're done (initially) creating or acquiring it.

The issue here is that you will possibly have two systems with 'clean' installs to do to.

Although I would recommend a clean install (and proper partitioning of) the system which you'll be taking the XT from, this will be the best way to proceed:

1) Copy the data to at least two external HDD's from Both systems.

2) Remove one of the RAIDed HDD's and CLONE the XT's system to the it.

3) Switch the cloned HDD with the XT drive. Boot up the system. Verify that everything is working as perfectly as it should be (and, it should be - you may have to re-enter key codes for certain programs, but after that they should be working exactly as on the XT drive).

4) Once verified that the cloned HDD works 100% in the other system (I would go so far as to do the disk based Recovery for this system to be 100% sure that it will at least get you to a known/good state in the event of a virus or O/S corruption), then I would proceed with installing the XT in the new MSI system along with the M4.


A lot of work to do the above... but that is exactly what I would be doing with this level of hardware available (make one system as optimally setup as possible).

Good luck.

 

What do you plan on doing with your current laptop? Are you going to still be using it?

If you will still be using the current laptop fairly often, I would recommend leaving the XT in that machine. Booting over and over from the XT is one place where the SSD portion of this drive kicks butt. Losing that, by replacing the drive may not be something you want. However, if you are putting the laptop into storage, then by all means use it.

While the Momentus XT is a 7200RPM drive, it benches almost at the same levels as a WD Scorpio Black for normal data which has not yet been copied into the SSD section of the drive. However, where the XT really shines is when reading files over and over again from the 4GB SSD portion of the drive.

As a data drive, your usage pattern will come into play for this. If you are constantly moving files to/from the drive OR writing / modifying files, some sections of those files won't make it into the SSD portion, and the drive, while pretty good, will not perform as spectacular when reading static files that have been copied to the SSD portion of the XT.

You'll have to be the judge of how you would use the drive. Maybe your data usage pattern lets the XT be a real performer. However, it could turn out replacing a 7200 RPM drive w/ the XT may be a wash.

HTH

 

Thank you for the answers.

I was watching the links. I have to study this subject a lot to understand it.