is it worth combining 2 HDDS

evening

i have two 3.5 hdds,
one a barracuda 320gb
and the other a cavier blue 250gb

i want to install them in my next build,
but not sure how to go about,
currently i use my barracuda as a backup for pictures/video (thats all whats on it)
and my cavier blue is what im using atm for windows and games,

what would you do, keep them separate or combine the two

buy an SSD, use the 250 for docs and stuff and the 320 for backup.

and stick windows on the ssd?
how big should i buy

You could get away with a 60Gb. It'll be big enough for a Windows 7 install but not much else. SSD are so much cheaper now though, cheaper than they were even a few weeks ago. My advice would be to decide on a budget and see what you can get. If you've got a budget in mind, I'd be happy to help by giving you a few suggestions.

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Originally Posted by loading...

SSD are so much cheaper now though, cheaper than they were even a few weeks ago. My advice would be to decide on a budget and see what you can get.

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i's certainly try to get a budget 60gb ssd to boot from

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Originally Posted by Greecean

i's certainly try to get a budget 60gb ssd to boot from

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60 gig SSD's have their downsides. There is a genuine advantage getting a larger drive, aside from the extra capacity. It's very common for SSD's with higher capacities to have double the IOPS of smaller drives in the same product line and sometimes they can have high read and write speeds. Smaller drives also wear out quicker, which is the key issue.

with the price drops grab a decent crutial m4 or samsung drive of a least 120gb.

60gb is to small.

the difference in price between 120GB and 60 is negligible at like £15/20

if you mean raid, you can only raid the same drive. if you meant raid 0, never ever do it.

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Originally Posted by raspute

if you mean raid, you can only raid the same drive.

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I don't think this is quite right. From my understanding you can put different drives and even ones of different capacitites in a RAID array, however it may bring some different limitations depending on the RAID used. IIRC, with all RAIDs, the capacity of each drive is limited to the capacity of the smallest drive. So for in OP's case, he has a 250 GB drive and a 320 GB drive, if he wanted to put them in a RAID 0 array (half of the bits on each drive (maybe each other bit on one drive, I can't remember)) then he would create a 500 GB RAID 0 array, as the 320 GB would act as a 250 GB drive (the 250 GB obviously can't act as a 320 GB drive and hold 320 GB of data!). There are also bandwidth limitations depending on the type of RAID array. For example, if one drive has 100 Mb/s of bandwidth and another has 150 Mb/s of bandwidth, you will be limited to 100 Mb/s of bandwidth in a RAID 0 array. However, inside a RAID 1 array you could potentially have 250 Mb/s of bandwidth, although this would rarely (never) be the case, performance increases of read speeds in RAID 1 depend entirely on whether there are optimisations made by the RAID controller for RAID 1.

I personly avoid raid, speedy but double the failure rate

Get a 120/128Gb SSD, prices in general are dropping for them atm. Two HDDs are a good idea incase one goes boom :P

It's a waste of money using an SSD for backup. SSD's cost a lot more than your drives and in any case it wasn't what you asked in the first place.

RAID is pointless for the home user.

Please bear in mind that home users often use the expression of "backup" when referring to hard drives - unless you have a very expensive setup (used by large companies) then a hard drive is never "backup" its storage. The reason for this is hard drive manufacturers rate their drives on whats called MTBF - mean time before failure. In other words hard drives are expected to fail and have to be replaced.

If you want to temporarily use your hard drives for storage then fine but if you want to safeguard your pictures then please use a proper backup medium such as optical disc. I've lost count of the number of clients I've had to salvage files from their hard drives from. Sometimes you can salvage files from a corrupt hard drive - sometimes you can't.

Simplest option is to just copy files from one hard drive to another - which would give you a certain amount of resilience - RAID is unnecessarily complicated with little benefit and as has been written you'd be limited to the size of the smallest drive. But use optical disc to properly protect your data