One Disk or Many Disks

I am slicker for speed, stability and reliability (maybe because i work professionally in the telecom domain). And then comes cost (which I am also conscious about, but not the cost of the above three). Possibly adaptability. In reality, even  assembling a PC has some of these tradeoffs provided you are aware and make this choices and not go by the wind. My use-case is a dual boot Windows + Linux box (love to do hackintosh, but I have a macbook already and to believe the apple's integration works much better). One area foremost for its applicability is storage. Lets see how.

(1) Performance - I must use SSD for OS and applications, while HDD for dynamic application and OS data, and just another data. With SSD i can get high performance, but not high storage capacity and heavy write reliability at practical (even if its expensive prices). With HDD I can get the latter two, but not the best in class performance(even with RAID).

Since we want provision of apps and reasonable amount of SSD space to be left for GC to be invoked infrequently, I did not think a 64 GB SSD would b enough. Next I wanted the speed king for this. OCZ Vertex 4 was one, but its 64 GB speed of I/O was less.

For linux I had done a opensuse 12.1 install on my old 160 GB caviar green and it seemed to allow a maximum root partition of 20 Gb out of which 33% was free after full install of client 7 server packages and quite a few addons. So I guessed since /home will have to be on HDD, and most linux apps are not as big as Windows, a 30 GB would be more than enough. I settled for Corsair Nova, though it might be among the slowest of SSDs around, still atleast twice as fast as an HDD.

(2) Reliability -- I must achieve reasonable isolation between OSes and see that the impact of failure is eliminated at the particular OS itself, so that rules out a single disk with multiple OS. So i definitely need multiple SSD and either multiple disks for data or RAID for one shared data disk. One more thing is that I consider SSDs to be more reliable than HDD, if they are not frequently written to.

I wanted my disks to ber big & fast (ruled out the Velociraptors and neither were they available in local market). So 7200 RPM, 64 MB cache, SATA 3 gbps was on the menu. Caviar blacks and WDE4 were the choices. However the former is unsuitable for RAID and so the choice fell on the enterprise drives.

(3) Adaptability -- a Tuning of one OS must not impact other in anyway and it should be tunable independently in terms of storage. So I can't do multi-boot OS config on one disk. Definitely not on the OS, but maybe on the data as re sizing and moving partitions would be simpler.

Cost Comparison (in India)
(a) General approach -- a 2 TB disk = 250$
(b) Reliable generalized approach -- 2x2 TB disks (2 x 300$) = $600 in India
(c) Fast but not entirely unreliable approach -- 1x128 GB SSD for Windows ($230) + 1x30 GB SSD for Linux ($60) + 1 TB data disk ($140) = $430
(d) Fast & Reliable
         (i) 1x128 GB SSD for Windows ($230) + 1x30 GB SSD for Linux ($60) + 2 X 1 TB data disk in RAID mode ($280) = $570
         (ii) 1x128 GB SSD for Windows ($230) + 1x30 GB SSD for Linux ($60) + 4 X 500 GB data disk in RAID mode ($90x4=$360) = $650

So if you put cost before everything else and is your only criteria go for (1). if you want speed but no reliability go for (c) If you want performance first, reliability second & adaptability third go for the choices in (d). And of-course the more disks you use you may run into constraints of PSU and number of SATA ports on your motherboard. 

Personally I started with (c) and plan to move to (d)(i) in due course of time to spread the cost. I can't put two many disks right now beacuse I have 8 SATA on my motherboard which are used like

(1) One for Optical DVD Drive
(2) One for HAF-X chassis front eSATA
(3) Two for Hot-swappable bays of HAF-X

That takes away half of the ports, and my expansion needs are one blue-ray writer (am yet to see a combo BLUE-ray/DVD/CD writer & reader). If I go for (d)(ii), I need to accomodate 2 SSDs and 4 HDDs requiring 6 SAta ports and I have just 4 left. Have a strong feeling that motherboard manufacturers should increase the number of SATA ports in high-end mobos to atleast 12 and preferably 16 (its a lot and I am not stacking up Internet porn). Going forward i see myself probably losing front eSATA or one hot swappable bay.

PC is fun and challenging if you do it my insane way. I definitely say throw your laptop and pick a tab + PC with tab for laid back content viewing & presentation and the PC for all content creation needs.