What are the pitfalls of installing my OS on a 1TB hard drive?

May 25, 2009 10:38 PM

Due to a virus corrupting my USB drivers, I've been thinking about a fresh WinXP install. But I'm thinking of getting a 1TB hard drive (my current one is 250). My question is, are there any potential pitfalls in having a HD that is so big? Other than the fact that it might fail six months in and I lose a large chunk of stuff. The reason why I want a huge HD is that I like the feeling that I don't have to worry about all the crap I might put on my desktop, or how many videogames I want to install.
posted by Sully to computers & internet (9 comments total)

Provided you get another 1TB drive to do backups, none at all. Remember, once upon a time we had drives of just a few GB, and before that we measured them in MB.
posted by Tomorrowful at 10:51 PM on May 25

No serious issues as such, apart from the question of whether it's worth separating programs from data, and using the 1TB drive as an external drive (eSATA preferably). This has the advantage of making it a lot easier to recreate your computer if it crashes again, especially if you get into the habit of downloading all install programs and Windows patches etc to a directory in the external drive. You can also backup the OS to a comparatively tiny part of the external drive.

Even in this day and age a 1TB drive that is full is likely to be full of data--AVIs especially, a typical episode of an hour-long TV show runs 200MB to 600MB depending on quality--rather than full of programs. Even absolutely huge programs rarely install to more than a few GB, and are usually supplied on one single 4.5GB DVD. (World of Warcraft runs to about 8GB as I recall.)

Apart from ease of reinstall there is a second advantage in that it's a lot easier to take the drive with you if you want to share files with friends, or work on a different computer, than to pack a whole desktop computer. You can even run Windows XP from an external drive, if you want to take "your computer" with you.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 11:39 PM on May 25

If it's an internal drive, make sure your make and model of motherboard can support 1TB drives - otherwise you might install the drive and be left wondering why your PC can't seem to 'see' it on bootup. I recently bought a 1.5TB drive, and you would not believe the stuff I had to go through in order to patch the bios of my AN7 motherboard.
posted by Ritchie at 2:08 AM on May 26

A large hard drive will tend to cause you to concentrate all of your data in one place. Thus, when the drive fails, you loose a lot more.

Otherwise the same rules apply. Backup everything you can't replace easily (your old 250gb drive may make an excellent backup drive.)
posted by wfrgms at 4:59 AM on May 26

... also if you like to defragment your hard drive alot or scan for viruses its going to take longer.
posted by glenno86 at 5:21 AM on May 26

We have a 1TB drive and I recently discovered that most partition programs won't work with it - they have a 500-800GB maximum.

Nthing glenno86 - I have not been able to defrag the whole drive yet.
posted by getawaysticks at 5:27 AM on May 26

Anything that accesses the whole drive at once will take longer. Anti-virus, defragmentation, formatting, etc. I've heard (anecdotal) that larger drives can take longer to seek files and access data, simply because of the massive amount of 0's and 1's to go through. Because of this, it's suggested that you run your OS on a smaller drive that has a faster seek time.

I'm currently running Windows 7 on a 250GB drive with a 1TB external drive as backup/storage. 250GB is more than enough to house the OS and all of my software and the external drive handles all my media and backups. This setup keeps my software on a quicker to access and faster to search drive inside the machine, but still allows me to get to everything I need. Even better, I can unplug the external drive and take it to another computer.

Are you storing music and video on your main HD as well? If you're like me, that's probably taking up far more of your storage than games.
posted by JuiceBoxHero at 6:34 AM on May 26

I've been thinking about a fresh WinXP install. But I'm thinking of getting a 1TB hard drive (my current one is 250). My question is, are there any potential pitfalls in having a HD that is so big?

Personally I would suggest re-using your old 250 GB drive to install XP and having the 1 TB drive as a second HD. The point of doing that is so that if you get another virus or want to upgrade to a new OS you can just copy your important stuff from your system drive to the 1 TB drive and re-format for the new install.

Other than the fact that it might fail six months in and I lose a large chunk of stuff.

Take it from someone who knows: this will happen eventually and you will wish that you had backed some things up. At the very least backup your most important data to an online backup service like Mozy, if you can't afford to buy another drive to do full backups. The best setup in my opinion is to have an external drive that matches your internal drive's size and have an automated method for doing backups to it. I've had half a dozen hard drive failures over the years but thanks to having good backup setups I haven't lost anything important in the last decade or so.
posted by burnmp3s at 7:37 AM on May 26 [1 favorite]

Thank you everyone for your advice.
It's all quite good.

I think I might compromise and get a 500 gig HD for my OS,
and a 1TB external.

Thanks!
posted by Sully at 10:53 PM on May 30