hello friends, need some advice

[Caged Anger]

Planning on getting a new 120 gig HD pretty soon and was wondering about a few things. I have no wish to get rid of my old 30 gig which still serves me well. My general question is what are the benefits to having dual HD's?

More specifically, if i should install my system files in the 30 gig, will that keep them safe from viruses if I should make everything else go to the 120 gig?

If not just by having 2 HD's, is there any way I can put a wall between the 2 drives which would secure the system files?

I know this sounds pointless and that i should simply get rid of the old one, but I'm really sick about having to reinstall my system files every time i should get a virus. Rather bothersome as you all must know

[JIMINATOR]

well, if you want to bypass that, install a clean os + all your main apps on the 120 gig drive. then boot up on the other drive and burn a dvd of the 120 gig drive. (should be <4 gig easy) if you don't have a dvd burner, then that is another thing that you should probably get, they are extremely useful, especially for copying huge hunks of data.

anyway, for your question, windows doesn't do permissions in that fashion very well. you are better off making the 30 gig into a backup drive and unplugging it. in theory you could set up a swap file on it or install certain apps on it, for for a 30 gig drive, it is probably going to be slower than the 120, maybe even a 5400 rpm drive, then you are going to be taking a hit on doing anything on that drive, so i suggest just using it as permanent offline storage and disconnecting it. if you build a new system later, then you will have a drive for it....

[ME BIGGD01]

i would imagine that the 30 gig hard drive is slower then you 120 gig drive. my suggestion is use the 120 gig drive as your main drive and partition it to what you want. i would use the 30 gig drive for data or music or just a temp drive. 30 gig drive is probably also old and maybe should be carefull if you have been using this drive for over 2 years. another suggestion is just doing clean install on the 120 gig and install all programs and use the 30 gig as a ghost drive and data backup drive. you do not have to let this drive run unless needed. i am sure the 120 gig drive will have an 8 MB cache which is better then your 1-2MB cache on 30 gig drive.

[ME BIGGD01]

as far as permissions go, you need to disable simple file sharing and then set the security permissions to what you feel. doing this is the proper way to make sure you 1 wont get hacked and no one can log onto your system and get into your personal data. windows does do this well but you have to configure it. you make windows do anything you want and be efficient as long as you do it right.


edit* if you were referring to having the 30 gig drive be just for your system files, you can do this also. it is kind of a waste of the drive and could be done with the 120 gig by creating a small partition fat16 and then create another partition for os. i see no reason to do this to be honest but if you want to anyway let me know and i will pm you the instructions.