14. Two Slow Hard Drives

Because there's sufficient volume inside the Pavilion dv8000z under the hand rest, HP has equipped this notebook with two 2.5" ATA hard drives.

The Pavilion dv8000z notebook accommodates two 2.5" hard drives.

Installing two hard drives offers numerous advantages. For one thing, storage capacity can be expanded more cheaply and easily. Additionally, sophisticated installations can boost overall notebook performance. Even though the two drives can't be installed as a RAID array, sophisticated drive layout and use can still improve performance. For example, when editing video or encoding audio files, reading files from one drive and writing them to another will speed things along somewhat. Another trick is to store the Windows XP swap file on the other drive (from the standpoint of where Windows system files reside), which noticeably boosts speed and improves every-day use thanks to faster I/O performance. It's also possible to use these drives to install independent operating systems, even without a boot manager, such as Linux and Windows. The default boot drive can even be specified in BIOS.

You can select the desired boot drive in BIOS during system startup.

On the other hand, the second drive can serve as a backup drive. Should the first drive ever fail, you can rely on the second drive as a backup - which, however, probably is not the safest form of data security.

Our dv8000z test machine included two 100 GB hard disks. Because their rotational speed is only 4,200 rpm, hard disk performance on this machine isn't exactly stellar. Installation of faster, more expensive 5,400 rpm drives offers obvious benefits, as our performance results clearly illustrate.

A notebook with two hard disks is rare.