Are Laptops with 2 drive bays limited to 17 inch models?

[firenice03]

So for example, from what you've just said, it therefore doesn't make any difference to PC speed (under a straightforward non-RAID setup) if the OS is installed either (1) entirely as /root on a single physical drive or, (2) with /root on one HDD and a separate /home on a second HDD, i.e. without RAID the two HDDs unable to work simultaneously to effect an increase in PC speed.

Mike

Not wanting to butt in... Or track too far from the original question, but wanting to see if I can help clarify/add..

In a desktop set up, having "/" and "/home" or xx on separate disks won't increase PC speed significantly to notice (Disk IO)
If this desktop is sharing/streaming files from "/home" and doing various other tasks where "/" would be accessed - then you would see the faster read/write speeds at the disk IO. This is more of a "home server"...
The bottle neck would be dependent on the system and tasks, but could be RAM, CPU's (if smaller set up), network -if this system is downloading files and streaming on say a WiFi adapter with "G" speeds..

If looking for a significant performance increase at the disk, then a SSD drive (I'll be doing this to the mini in the near future).
Having "/" and "/home" separate from each other does ease pain like when upgrading or crashing "/" even if its 1 disk with 2 partitions; unless the disk fails...

RAID
- in my opinion at the desktop level the preference would be for redundancy; having "/home" written to 2+ disks should a disk fail it can be recovered/rebuilt from the other(s) depending on which raid...

- or if you have multiple disks that you want combined as 1 drive (i.e. 4x100gb as 1x400gb disk); lose 1 and its all gone, unless adding the option of redundancy... Same example now 2/2 (1x200gb redundant drive )

The additional disk (IO) speed gains from RAID, won't be noticed unless the activities are disk IO intense...

Hope it helps clarify and not confuse 

[Wirezfree]

Linux Raid 10, this gives you a degree of performance boost, and some redundancy, but ideally 4 disks for better redundancy.

Four disks: I assume that's a PC Tower set-up!

Mike

Not necessarily the usual "Big Tower"...

I have this InWin SFF Case which had a single 5.25" bay, meant for a full size CD/DVD type device.
I instead fitted a 4 X 2.5" to 5.25" Icybox Hotswap Bay (You can actually get 6 Bay units)


Biggest challenge was getting a sensibly priced Motherboard with 4 X SATA3 and Low power for the small case.

[Wirezfree]

@firenice03

You hit the nail on the head, Disk IO & Disk Controllers that is where things start to bottleneck.
Unless you spend "significant $$" on specialist Mobo with 10+ SATA3 ports, or Hardware RAID controller card,
for home usage you have to work with what you have, or can afford.


Even with regular consumer SSD's you really need SATA3, you can easily saturate SATA1/2 with SSD's.
The new m2 SSD's plug straight on Mobos PCIE connectors for that reason.

Quick addition,
Where it sometimes can be confusing, SATA use Gbps(small b) and Disks use M[color=rgb(255, 0, 0)]B[/color]/s(Big B)
So SATA3 6Gbps = 600MB/s, current consumer SSD's(2.5") under the right circumstances can run @ 550MB/s, so close to even SATA 3.0 limit

[m654321]

Thanks - I'm afraid you guys have lost me - I'm not up to speed (pardon the pun) with RAID etc - also we've begun to steer a bit far from the original question which was whether two drive bays are limited to 17-inch or 17-inch+ laptops... 

Mike

[Wirezfree]

Sorry about the OT stuff...

It appears you can get 2 drives in smaller Laptops, but at the expense of possibly any optical drive.
Googling around references new models that have 2 X mSATA bays, but looking at them it's not obvious.
I think they maybe offered as "option" If you are looking for a new one.?, You may have to call some dealers.