Ripley, I hate to say it but the bigger drives are not "more efficient" at data handling than smaller drives. I know someone is going to disagree with me, and I'm probably not going to mention something important but as simplified as I can get, higher capacity means higher data compression rates, higher seek times and higher write times. Though it may be more efficient technology than say 5 years ago (larger cache, faster components, better compression algorythms) it still has to follow the same principles and the higher capacity you go, the more cycles the drive has to perform for any given task. A 7200RPM Terabyte drive can have the exact same latency or slower, write and seek times as a 7200RPM 500GB hard drive, even if the smaller drive has a smaller cache.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148309 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148278Both Seagate drives. Notice the lack of information about seek and write times on the 1TB drive.
Now take a look at specs on a lower capacity 10,000 RPM drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148278That would be a big data transfer performance difference from his current drive(S) if he had the SATA3.0GB interfaces...as it stands his cpu is a Pentium D 2.8GHz which puts the age of that system at around 4 years +/- 1 which puts the SATA connections at SATA II,
not the current SATA3.0Gb. He can put a SATA3.0Gb drive in it but the data throughput is going to be at the lower standard, which means no significant performance improvement based on the hard drive other than transferring data across the drive from folder to folder.
Buying a huge hard drive then partitioning it is much less effective and much riskier to data loss than multiple physical drives. Take your setup for example. A 1TB drive with 2 or 3 partitions. What's going to happen to your data if sector zero gets damaged? You lose access to the entire drive and
everything on it. You won't get it back unless you want to spend some cash shipping it to a data recovery specialist. Using a mulitple drive (maybe multi partition on the secondary drive) scheme is much more effective and less likely to experience catastrophic data loss than over working a single drive with multiple partitions. It's common knowledge that the primary drive (C:\) gets the most use and is more prone to failure than a secondary drive doing nothing more than housing data. Adding partitions to the same physical drive just adds to the workload. Having multiple drives in a system die is not impossible but it doesn't occur as often as primary drive failure. Reloading the OS on a drive with multiple partitions becomes a pain in the butt too, especially with Windows. Sitting up at 2 a.m. and having a few drinks under your belt, it's very likely a mistake will be made.
Just my personal preference, but I run a smaller drive as my primary and a large capacity drive for my secondary. Windows as well as all programs goes on the smaller drive then my paging file as well as data that I want to keep goes on the larger secondary drive. I have yet to lose any data.
