From your post here Tigger29 I have to ask this..........
Are you married?
Or are Mrs Tigger29 & the kids computer gurus & do this instinctively?
Otherwise you'd know why there are some that still would use a huge HDD as a boot drive.
It's EASIER to restore the drive!
Lord knows that's true in Pudgieland!
Haha.. about being married... well it's a long story.
I completely understand why someone would want to use a single drive on a computer... COMPLETELY... but.. in the OP's first post he was asking about SPEED. To be honest, the average person who wouldn't know how to set up a computer with two drives wouldn't even notice a difference between a 1TB 5400rpm and a 1TB 7200rpm drive (let alone 32mb vs 64mb cache). Besides, having two drives makes perfect sense to me.
Firstly, because the data that would take up the most space on a drive (media files) would not be accessed nearly as often as System and Program files... and when they ARE accessed, it's more of a sequential read... basically a media drive suffers a lot less wear than a boot drive does.
Think of an old vinyl record... you can put the needle at the very edge and play the entire record.. and repeat this probably thousands of times (if not more) and the record would likely show almost no signs of wear. Take that same record.. place the needle at a random spot... then a few seconds later move the needle to another random spot... repeat this thousands of times and I can guarantee the record is going to become scratched and worn. Also, imagine if there were an electric motor controlling the location of the needle. It too would suffer a lot less wear and last a lot longer during the first scenario than the second.
Basically, a drive used solely for media storage is going to last a lot longer and be a lot more dependable than a drive being used as a boot/programs drive.
Now, you mentioned difficulty of backing up/restoring multiple drives. Well, backing up and restoring a smaller drive is a much faster process than a large drive. Also, I fail to see how restoring a large drive is any easier than a small one? If anything, it would be slower and harder in my mind. I also fail to see why it really makes a big deal either way.. as restoring a drive isn't something that should be done often (and if your wife/kids are doing things to the computer to make this necessary on a regular basis, then maybe you need to look further into why that is).
But you are correct.. having a single drive for everything is a lot more simpler, and if that is your goal then by all means go that route.. but if you're looking to get the most performance out of your system then that would be ill-advised.
