Setting Up Dual Hard Drives?

[Cheveyo]

Wow it has been a long time since I was last on these forums...But that will be changing, finally I'm able to get back into the sky this weekend if all goes well...Its been almost 3 years ...just have to track down my pesky joystick that seems to have wondered off.

I'm sure this question is probably on the forums somewhere, but on a tight time schedule tonight and no time to search...please no marmalade bombs

Back in August I started building a system one piece at a time, and as of tonight the final piece to the puzzle (Graphics card) has arrived and is installed, the beast is ready to come to life tomorrow night after work. But before that first power on...I have on bit of confusion to clear up on the hard drive configuration. Never dealt with multiple drives before so it is a first for me.

I want them to run as 2 separate drives, one dedicated strictly for the use and storage of Flight Sim, and the primary for everything else. Know a little about RAID configs but never really messed with them and Google is just not being my friend on this. Trying to avoid a screw up in the programing. So in a short form...do I just leave both plugged in and skip the RAID setup, or should I leave one disconnected during the initial setup phase and connect it after everything is running?

Now for the breakdown of the new beast...

Specs:
Cooler Master HAF 932 Advanced Blue Edition Case
Cooler Master 1000W Power Supply (Fully Modular)
Gigabyte GA-ZA7X-UD3H Motherboard
Intel I7-4771 Haswell 3.5GHz LGA 1150 Quad Core Processor
Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB DDR3 1866 Memory Dual Channel
EVGA/Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 Classified 4GB GDDR5 PCI-E 3.0 x16 Graphics Card
2x...Western Digital VelociRaptor 250GB 10,000 RPM Hard Drives SATA III 6GB/s
LG Blu-Ray Drive/Burner
Arctic Freezer 7 Pro Rev.2 Heatsink
Windows 7 Ultimate

Also upgrading to FSX...and if this rig doesn't make it scream for mercy...I don't know what will.

[OldAirmail]

"....
2x...Western Digital VelociRaptor 250GB..."

You have 2 hard drives with a 250GB capacity???

Do I have this right????

[Cheveyo]

You have 2 hard drives with a 250GB capacity???

Do I have this right????

Each drive is 250GB...so 500GB total which is more then enough for my needs. Current laptop will become the catch all for the misc. junk.

[OldAirmail]

OK. Got it.

It's just that the rest of you stuff is so far above mine, that I would have suspected larger drives.


I'd skip RAID, myself. There are other ways of getting a faster system.


Two 250BG Drives.

In that case do I have a deal for you!

Do a quick read about Junction Link Magic. It's under JUGGLE KNIVES


Simple explanation - install all the basic stuff to the C: drive. Set up junction points with Junction Link Magic to the second drive.

When possible, install "other" software to the second drive.


Don't forget to set up the swap file to the second drive. Windows will have absolutely no problem reading & writing to 2 drives at once.

Meaning that if it has to use the swap file while your programs are reading/writing to the C: drive, your programs (on the C: drive) will run faster.



I've been using Junction Link Magic for more than 2 months now without ANY problems.

And that is with a mixed drive system. One drive is an SSD, the other is a normal hard drive.

[Cheveyo]

Thanks for the info...

However a little digging in some settings after getting it running provided the solution. Just had to allocate the drive and format it for storage...with the addition of creating a "Program Files (x86)" folder...FSX installed and is now up and running on its own personal drive

More or less stumbled onto the solution...really was expecting a much more complicated setup.

[OldAirmail]

That will work, I've used that in the past when trying to keep my SSD from filling up too soon.

The problem, as you'll find out, is that it isn't dynamic.

[Hestntonpms]

Correct me if I am mistaking but in a Raid 0 config, even if you have 2, hard drives at let's say 250 gig each , isn't the system capacity 250 gig not 500?
Mine is set up in Raid 0 and that is my understanding with 2, 1 T/B drives I gain performance but only have 1 TB worth of space.
Am also funny aware if either HD takes a dump, I lose everything.
Only doing this until I get my 1 TB SSD which right now is through the roof in price