Which is better 2 500 MB hard disks or one 1 TB hard disc. I wish to know pros and cons of both configs as I intend to add another TB to my comp( have adequate space for both configs)
My personal preference would be 1 TB. If you look at Seagate Barracuda, 1 TB have better performance than 500 TB. I think, similar is the case with WDC caviar Black (1 TB, 2 TB) and Caviar Green. Perhaps you can buy 1 TB HDD and some 250-500 GB of external. Partitioning could be an issue with 1 TB if you plan on low partition sizes (too many partitions). If this capacity is all you need, then better with 2 of 500 GB. However, if you plan to expand storage, better to go with 1 TB. Even though you may have many bays for HDD, each HDD adds to the system temp. I know from experience. I have 5 HDD of 1 TBB (space for 7) and future steps would be to not buy 1 TB at all, and buy only 2 TB. For me, I think 4 HDD is optimum for my box. I prefer to keep most of my storage internally, with only 2 TB as external across 3 devices.
Thanks for your ans acyuta. Is data loss a more severe problem if we are using larger drives ie. if the drive fails we lose more of the data. Is it true that a drive tends to fail more as we go up in capacity.
All drives of all capacities can fail. That is why it is wise to have an external HDD for backups. I personally prefer to buy a new HDD when all my HDDs cumulatively are close to 60-70% full. Right now, it is 2 TB out of 5 TB full. The really important stuff for me is photos which cannot be reshot. Docs are smaller in size and only 10 GB max. Softwares exe.s are only 150 GB. Movies are anyway backed up on DVD for playing on home theatre. If you download movies but play it on HT (not PC), you will find 1 TB filling up fast (for me, close to 125-150 GB per month, net). I prefer to keep the downloaded movie on the HDD till I have not watched it on TV. This is because conversion or synchronisation may be erroneous and I can convert again quickly. Anyway, I would consider failure to be a non-issue as long as I have a backup. FYI, I have just ordered thru amazon a 2 TB caviar black. Even a 1 TB caviar black is extremely fast, but SSDs are of course a different matter. In 7200 SATA hdd, your best buy would be a Caviar Black. 1 TB is for around 70 pounds, and 2 TB is for 124 pounds in UK. As to Seagate, I have been using Seagate for a long time, and I have seen none of them fail. However, they were replaced because capacity became insufficient. As to price, a 1 TB HDD is right now available at the same price as a 500 GB HDD was say in the beginning of 2010.
If you value your Data, 2 identical drives in RAID 1 are smart. Within the same family of drives (ie: 7200.12 500GB or 7200.12 1000GB) the transfer rates will be about the same although with NCQ and multiplatters can do better on some benchmarks. Dollar per GB the single drive costs less, unless it fails on you and you don't have it backed up.
I agree with 2centsworth. nowadays the price of hard drive keep going down. consider raid 1 are copy and raid 0 stripe which is faster performance for read and write data but chance to loose everything when 1 drive died. so it would depend on what you like to use the disk for. and on my opinion somehow Seagate was not good with my 1000 GB I have to send two back to RMA. I used Hitachi and so far no problem. good luck.
For what it's worth, I use 2-3 500GB WD drives in multiple RAID 0 (via.Hardware controller not windows.) arrays. This gives me great performance by for large file handling. Since the whole RAID 0 array is lost in a drive fails, I keep Snapshot backups of array 1 on array 2 and backups of array 2 on array 1. This works for me. Also the replacement cost of 500GB drives keeps getting lower. I put critical stuff on DVD's and catalog it with a program called visual CD (freeware). Fisherman, jj