1 hard drive or 2 hard drives that is the question.

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I've gone all Shakespear

I intend on my new system to dual boot XP & Vista, is it better to have one hard drive or two?

 

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Always two for obvious reasons. Any furture system I have (as well as the current one) will have two non-RAID drives minimum.

 

Are you just seeing from a corruption point of view? which I fully understand it's just someone ttold me there would be no need.

I am looking at two SATA2 Samsung spinpoint drives probably within the 350GB - 500GB range.

 

I have two... but one is a disconnected point-in-time mirror.

 

I'm running 2 x 500 Gb seagate.

One has my Xp Pro, the other, Vista Business

 

Yep, for greater storage reliability. What was their reason for saying that two drives is an unnessary measure?

 

The guy was saying that if I had two hard drives and I got a virus they would both become infected anyhow, so I might aswell use 1 and have 2 partitions.

But I think he was talking twaddle imo.

 

Two would be better as certain features on Vista e.g. Complete PC Backup require you to use a different hard drive.

 

I would say it's more a case of they *could* both get infected, not *would*.

Currently I'm not running anything on my Vista drive but have NOD32 Suite on my Xp which is where I do my main stuff. Vista partition just used for training stuff at the mo'. If I ask NOD32 for a custom scan, it does give the option to scan the Vista drive, it's just that if I boot into it then the security is not running whereas it is from the Xp drive.

Horses for courses I'd say.

 

As UKDarkstar said, it is a case of 'could' rather than 'would'. It would depend on if files are shared between the drives by whatever means that would determine if the both become infected.

 

I am not going to share between the two drives, I will be using XP as my main OS and Vista for learning purposes.

 

I have my OS and applications programs installed on one drive, and my games and valuable data on the other.

 

another vote for 2 > HDD aren't that expensive now.

edit: or get 1 and use VMWARE for vista if its for testing.
you could always whack another one in later

 

So in that case would it be possible to have 2 OSs on one drive and the data and games on the other? I take it by way of sharing.

 

Well I have Ubuntu and XP on one drive and no OS on the other. Given that Ubuntu is a live CD distribution of Linux I decided that even if both fail because of the drive all I have to do is pop the CD in and boot up!

 

you can have 2 os on 1 drive as long as these are partitioned. say the drive is 250gb. c partition is 120 and d is 120, that will work fine, however, it is definatly not recommended that you dual boot 2 os on the same partition.

edit> ms kb

 

Well, I installed Ubuntu on an XP partition to try it out... I liked it, but am a bit too lazy at the moment to give it its own partition. Secondly, I'm currently not using Ubuntu enough to give it a massive amount of space.

I'll see how it goes, but XP has precedence at the mo'.

 

Thought the version of Ubunto was on a LIVE cd based. It would work without any version of any os installed on a pc. Its booted up and executed via the cd

 

My next PC that I build will have a raid mirror setup for sure. Then I'll creat one partition for the OS and the other for data files, etc. Ironically when I setup raid for the first time, one of my hard drives died that same week, what a coincidence.

 

Via Live CD it's...

1. Slower (very much slower!).
2. Is not as full an OS as the installation.