hard drives.

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iluvslp

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im a noob to this forum, my question is how can i connect 2 hard drives to my computer and how can i make the OS load faster, for example having a 10000 rpm HD so that it can load and the other HD to store my info, is this possible, and also what is the fastest HDD that i can
buy, price doesnt matter.
 
You can use one disk to install the OS, and another to store your files.

You can also put two disks in a RAID-0 configuration, so they will work together as one disk, making it faster.

I don't know which disk is the fastest, but it will be either an SCSI or SAS disk (the 15,000RPM models). You need a seperate controller for these ypes of disks. Both the disks and the controller are very expensive.

Don't buy a PCI-X controller if you are not absolutely sure your motherboard has PCI-X slots (only server motherboards have them). Get a regular PCI controller or a PCI-E controller. I don't know if PCI will be sufficient to get the most out of a SCSI or SAS RAID-0 array.
 
SAS vs parallel SCSI
SAS uses Serial transfer protocol to interface multiple devices hence lesser signaling overhead than parallel SCSI, resulting in higher speed.
No bus contention as SAS bus is point-to-point while SCSI bus is multidrop. Each device is connected by a dedicated bus to the initiator. Connection through expanders may appear to cause some contention, but this is transparent to the initiator.
SAS has no termination issues and does not require terminator packs like parallel SCSI.
SAS eliminates skew.
SAS supports higher number of devices (> 16384) while Parallel SCSI limits it to 16 or 32.
SAS supports higher transfer speed (1.5, 3.0 or 6.0 Gbps). The speed is realized on each initiator-target connection, hence higher throughput whereas in parallel SCSI the speed is shared across the entire multidrop bus.
SAS supports SATA devices.
SAS uses SCSI commands to interface with SAS End devices.


SAS vs SATA
SATA devices are uniquely identified by their port number connected to the Host bus adapter while SAS devices are uniquely identifed by their World Wide Name (WWN).
SATA 1 devices do not support command queuing while SAS devices support Tagged Command Queuing. Effort is on in SATA 2 to support command queuing using Native Command Queuing (NCQ).
SATA follows ATA command set and supports hard drives and CD-ROM drives only while SAS supports a wide range of devices including hard drives, scanners, printers, CD-ROM drives etc.
SAS hardware allows multipath I/O to devices while SATA does not. Effort is on in SATA 2 to use port multiplier to achieve mulitpathing.
SATA is primarily used for non-critical applications like home PC use while SAS, due to its robustness, can be used for critical server applications.
SAS error recovery and reporting are much cleaner than SATA.
SAS complements SATA and is not a competitor to SATA.
 
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