Two 1 terabyte HDs in a residential desktop Windows 7--any problems?

I have three hard drives (main storage units). A 32 GB SSD
drive, a 150 GB Raptor, and a 750 GB standard (could be
smaller).

Actually, I could do without one of the conventional hard drives.
Maybe a 64 GB SSD drive and a 500 GB conventional drive.

I suppose the raptor would sell on eBay. Or maybe I'll just remove
it and keep it for troubleshooting.

"Paul" wrote:
Timothy Daniels wrote:
"Paul" wrote:
You can boot from a Primary. That may be their advantage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_pa...nded_partition


That's correct - only a Primary partition can be set as "Active"
and have a boot sector. (The MBR on the boot drive will pass
control to its "Active" partition's boot sector, which will pass control
to the loader which is assumed to be on the same partition.) But the
OS can be on another partition, even an Extended partition, even on
another hard drive. Whether that other device can be external
depends on whether the BIOS has a controller for the external drive
or whether the controller is in the OS that is to be loaded. To avoid
running into a possible "Chicken-or-Egg" conflict, it's best to just put
data on external drives. As for an Extended partition being the only
partition on a hard drive that is used just for data, I don't see that
anything prevents it, since the partition table lists it the same way as
a Primary partition.

*TimDaniels*

I've even had a setup ignore the "Active" flag. In one thing I was doing
here, I changed the "Active" flag, thinking it was guaranteed to
change what does the booting, and it didn't work. Grub was behind that.
So the Active flag would seem to be a "hint", rather than a guarantee
something good will happen.


Right, again. The "Active" flag just tells the MBR which partition should
have the boot sector. It doesn't guarantee that a boot sector or a load
manager will be there.

*TimDaniels*

John Doe wrote:
I have three hard drives (main storage units). A 32 GB SSD
drive, a 150 GB Raptor, and a 750 GB standard (could be
smaller).

Actually, I could do without one of the conventional hard drives.
Maybe a 64 GB SSD drive and a 500 GB conventional drive.

I suppose the raptor would sell on eBay. Or maybe I'll just remove
it and keep it for troubleshooting.

Keep it for troubleshooting. That's where all my spare disks came from,
leftovers from upgrades.

Paul

"BIOS gives an option of IDE vs AHCI--I chose IDE since I heard it has
fewer potential problems and is not, for a non-commercial system, that
much slower, and in fact sometimes quicker."

I've never understood the reluctance to set AHCI in a modern computer.

While it is true that you will not see any real world performance
difference in a normal residential setting, AHCI simply uses the full
capabilities of a modern hard drive in a modern OS. Why would you choose
to use the legacy controller if your new computer is capable of using
the new one?

That said, if you have already installed the (Windows) OS in IDE mode I
wouldn't spend the time trying to change it to AHCI. *That* would not be
worth the effort for the reasons stated.

On Sun, 13 Mar 2011 09:11:37 -0400, TVeblen
wrote:


"BIOS gives an option of IDE vs AHCI--I chose IDE since I heard it has
fewer potential problems and is not, for a non-commercial system, that
much slower, and in fact sometimes quicker."

I've never understood the reluctance to set AHCI in a modern computer.

While it is true that you will not see any real world performance
difference in a normal residential setting, AHCI simply uses the full
capabilities of a modern hard drive in a modern OS. Why would you choose
to use the legacy controller if your new computer is capable of using
the new one?

That said, if you have already installed the (Windows) OS in IDE mode I
wouldn't spend the time trying to change it to AHCI. *That* would not be
worth the effort for the reasons stated.

Actually, it's not that hard to change, at least not on a Vista or Win
7 system. see the MS support doc he

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

I had run my Vista system for over a year with IDE instead of AHCI,
and realized taht hot swapping of the drives woud be a real advantage,
so in about two minutes of searching I found this. I used the "fixit"
procedure and that did the trick. I installed the changes (whatever
they are) from "fixit" and then went into the BIOS and changed the
drives to AHCI and now have hot swap working.