Two harddrives

[Peter H]

Hi all
i am in the process of doing some basic upgrades on my system. the thing i need to upgrade most it the harddrive. at the moment i have a 20gig hdd formatted in fat 32. i want to add another hdd probably a 80gig as a secondary drive for video editing and storing mp3s and pictures. can i have the primary drive stay as fat32 and have the secondary formatted as ntfs, or should i convert the primary drive to ntfs as well. what do you think.

Thanks
pete

[SLICK RICK]

The primary drive can stay as a Fat32, it will not affect the secondary drive being NTFS, although I would recommend you getting something larger than a 80GB hard drive as your secondary. Try to get at least a 120GB.

SLICK RICK

[Craig Tucker]

I agree with Rick, 80GB will soon get swallowed up doing video editing, let alone any storage.

[Peter H]

thanks for the advice, ill start looking into a 120gig hdd, the cost difference is not that much when you compare them anyway. thanks again.

Peter H

[Cobra]

Peter,

Would you not be better using your new hard drive as your primary drive if it's faster than the 20GB one? I have two hard drives in my PC: a 40GB 5400rpm Seagate (which was the original drive) and a new 80GB 7,200rpm IBM. When I got the new 80GB I installed Windows onto it and just used my older 40GB for storing movies etc.

If they're both as fast as each other, ignore me...

CobraDMX

[blinkme_210]

Yeh, what Cobra said. Boot off the hard drive that has the faster speed. It'll boot up even faster if you're planning to buy one of the Western Digital Caviar brand drives, as they have 8megs of cache, as compared to the traditional 2megs.

[slimmx]

Peter,

Would you not be better using your new hard drive as your primary drive

CobraDMX

I agree with him too. If I were I would get the new hard drive and then break it in 2 partitions. 1st for Windows and second for storage. You will end up with 3 partitions. 1 for win. 2nd for video editing and maybe 3rd the 20 gb for backup. That's the set up that I have right now. I have one 80 gb and another 120 gb. I use the 80 gb for backup and 120 gb I broke in 2. 1st partition 20gb and second 90something.

Tell me what you think about this setup.

[slimmx]

8megs of cache, as compared to the traditional 2megs.

By the way are there any apps that will allow me to find out the cache spped of my drives.

[Peter H]

thanks again for the advice, i will have to think about it, Im not to worried about the boot up speed im more interested in the space.

Thanks
Peter H