Couple of Hard drive Questions

[Jase]

I will be building a computer as soon as I complete the parts selection.I saw that Best Buy had Western Digital 120gb Hard drives for $69. Since that wasn't much more expensive than the 40 gb drive I was going to get for the OS, I bought two, one for audio and one for OS.
Now I'm wondering if the large drive is a bad idea for an OS drive. Will that slow things down? Also is WD good for audio? who has experience with this brand vs. other brands? thanks

 

[Bulls Hit]

WD should be fine. Perhaps not as quiet as a Barracuda, but just as reliable.

I suggest you partition your OS drive into say 30GB & a 90GB partitions. Install the OS & apps on the 30GB and use the 90GB to backup your audio files

 

[M.Brane]

I've got a couple of WD 80GB JB drives I've been using for over a year now with no problems, and good performance.

Having a large drive for the OS is not a problem, and can actually boost performance slightly over a smaller drive. Most drives tend to slow down once you get 'em more than 50% full.

You can always partition the drive into smaller volumes to help keep things organised. I have my boot drive divided into 3 volumes. I boot from the 1st partition (the fastest), and use the second two for dumb storage (backups of what's on my second drive).

Remember that an ATA bus can only access 1 drive at a time so you'll get the best performance by running only 1 drive per channel (no slaves), and putting all your audio on the second drive.