Opinion wanted

So I'm getting a second hard drive for my laptop. I will have a 5400 rpm and a 7200rpm 16MB cache. I can put both my drives in my laptop at the same time. I do a lot of Exchange 2007 stuff and currently, running labs off my regular drive just kill my machine.

So if you were me, would you:

A: Take the 7200 rpm drive, use it as my main drive for Vista to make my machine more responsive and use the 5400 rpm to run Virtual Machines

or

B: Keep the 5400 rpm drive as my main drive and use the 7200 rpm drive to run Virtual Machines.

I'm leaning more towards A. Opinions?

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Comments

Mishra

Flip a coin and go. I think it is too much worrying for that little bit of a speed difference. You wouldn't notice either circumstance.

royal

I'm a speed junky. And no, not that kind of speed!

Smallguy

I don't think u can go wrong with either setup

but depending on your ram situation and max ram your notebook will handle you might want to look at that

sprkymrk

Use it for whichever one you place your swapfile on.

Plantwiz

Buy a third drive that is also 7200 and a USB External HDD case and mount the 5400 in there....then you can have 2 x 7200 to setup as you desire and an extra drive for backup

Otherwise, I echo above...not significant enough difference to make a huge difference (IMNSHO)...yes there is a difference...just not enough to me to care which way considering how you'll be using them (if I were you setting it up).

royal

Plantwiz wrote:

Buy a third drive that is also 7200 and a USB External HDD case and mount the 5400 in there....then you can have 2 x 7200 to setup as you desire and an extra drive for backup

There's actually a guy at my work who does this. He's got a huge lab built that he brings to customers using the 2 hds he has built in and usb drives in every port. Crazy!

Plantwiz

Hey I had one of those USB drives why back before they were cool...now it's easier to have drive on a keychain or such, but I was able to extend the life of my notebook drives....or I should say continue using them rather then just creating a towering stack

jbaello

royal wrote:

I'm a speed junky. And no, not that kind of speed!

Haha! I guess swapfile on the 7200 rpm. Have you tried Raid 0 using external drive as your 3rd drive? lol...

Ahriakin

Before the swapfile becomes a decision making factor I'd setup a performance counter to track it's usage, if you have a decent amount of ram it's likely rarely used. I'd definitely make the 7200 rpm my main drive.

sprkymrk

Ahriakin wrote:

Before the swapfile becomes a decision making factor I'd setup a performance counter to track it's usage, if you have a decent amount of ram it's likely rarely used. I'd definitely make the 7200 rpm my main drive.

With his intended use of Virtual Machines I am betting the swap file will get used a lot by the time he allocates a decent amount of RAM to the VM's.

Ahriakin

I agree with the reasoning and you are most likely correct, but for any serious performance decisions I like to check the system usage first.
It's bugged me since the NT days that Microsoft always recommended a min. of 1.5x your physical RAM, when logic says that the more you have the less you need the swap - it seemed like lazy logic on their part in simply correlating more physical ram with the server/workstation needing even more for eventual swap usage, like no one would ever increase their RAM 'comfort zone' in the years to come. Back in the early days RAM was so expensive it was a given you wouldn't have enough to run the OS properly and major swap usage was inevitable, not so true nowadays imho. (of course that depends on context)

JdotQ

royal wrote:

A: Take the 7200 rpm drive, use it as my main drive for Vista to make my machine more responsive and use the 5400 rpm to run Virtual Machines