One Hard Drive or Two?

Having sorted my husband out I am now turning to my own new machine! I will be buying from Evesham too but they don't say if their twin drives are RAID or what. Instead of the 250GB SATA drive I was going to have and create partitions I thought I would have twin 160GB SATA drives and use them in a mirror configuration until I need the space to stripe them or whatever. Or I might use one for Windows and the other to mess about with. My present computer will be configured as a Server. Is it important that I know if the drives on my new computer are RAID and which type?

JBOD (just a bunch of disks) is your third alternative, no raid at all - sata is pretty quick on its own (& will & is very quick with two & the swap file in a partition on its own on the second disk) - but if you feel the need for speed still more, then Raid Striping will give you the fastest result, but if your raid falls over, its all gone, wheras mirroring gives you data integrity in that you have two copies of everything.

This ones quite complicated to come at from every angle as to whats best.

What's most important here for you morselady 'safeness', speed or cost (this is for your hubby to work with his video ?) or capacity if it is this 'video machine' which I thought was ordered already :confused: , or are you changing your mind ?

Sorry I did not make it very clear so I have edited my original post on this thread to reflect the fact that we are talking about a different machine, mine! Now I have got my husband's ordered and out of the way I can go back to configuring and ordering my own. I have everything sorted out except the hard drives(s) and the machine will of course have XP Pro and 1GB memory. Not sure of my reason for considering two disks except that I could use the second disk to mirror my data partition and keep my Windows backups on but there again I could do this on another machine and execute any neccessary backups over a network connection and my present machine has an 80GB hard disk of which only a fraction is being used. Even after I put Server 2003 eval on to help me with my exams there will be lots of space left for backup storage.

I was about to settle for one 250GB disk when I noticed two 160MB disks do not cost much more but to be perfectly honest I do not know why I need two. Speed is important but I will have that anyway but one thing which does concern me is that if I have a 250GB disk I will have to use fdisk to partition it because Partition Magic only supports up to 160GB I think.

I think my head is scrambled with this migraine, sorting my husband out and the fact that I have yet to do my MCP exams.

I'd say if you are happy with the cost difference, then get two disks as if nothing else it halves your chance of not halving a working drive, then raid is another alternative later if you want it/need the speed boost ?

As for partitioning, I never use partition magic , always good old windows. If 137gb was the number you are worried about, xp & w2k & w2k3 'patched & slipstreamed' (or recent retail) should have setup routines that can sort everything out right.

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Originally Posted by confus-ed

As for partitioning, I never use partition magic , always good old windows.

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I feel I must offer another view on this. Just last week Partition Magic saved my bacon at a customers site who had a W2K pro PC with a 2GB C: drive and the other 38Gb as the D: and performing like a dog :p In 20 mins he had 10GB and 30GB respectively. I use it only when I have to but it's great.

Otherwise I agree with -Ed! (2 disks at 160gb)

I have always found PM can do things Windows can't and I would be lost if I could not use it but I have decided to go for the two disks anyway and I think one 250GB disk would be a bit large to manage and if that went what a hell of a big disk to lose and no backup. Thanks for the advice all.

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Originally Posted by gazzak while talking about Partition Magic

.. I use it only when I have to but it's great...

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Its great for 'after' .. here though I was guessing Morselady was thinking that she had to use PM to get past the 137gb limit, as originally before various patches, this was one of the ways around this... btw Ranish Partition manager can do what PM can do (mostly) but is free & also doesn't seem to suffer from the infamous PM 'failing' & that's calculating cyclinder boundaries correctly where volumes have multiple partitions & operating systems :).

I always prefer 2 drives in my main puter. One for system, one for my stuff. Normally, this is synched to a similar-sized drive in my fileserver, so I've got access to my data if I'm in the workshop.

I take it that it is better to have two 120GB disks and use one for system and one for data storage than to have one 250GB disk and partition it for system and data drives? I could put my swap file on the disk used for storage too?

I have seen references to SATA and partitioning somewhere on here and as all the disks offered are SATA I wonder if there are any problems which one would not get with ordinary disks?

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Originally Posted by MorseLady

I take it that it is better to have two 120GB disks ..
..I have seen references to SATA and partitioning somewhere on here and as all the disks offered are SATA I wonder if there are any problems which one would not get with ordinary disks?

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Other than cost, two drives is always better than one & yes putting any swap file on a second disk (in its own partition to stop it defragmenting so much) adds a great deal of performance generally but here you'd have raid options which are faster still .. but that's where it gets confusing !

.. its also the reason why you see so many threads about SATA installation problems, as folks are often juggling this idea, and an existing windows install on IDE. There's no real practical difference to the end user between IDE & SATA other than 'having the right wires' - what's usually different is the introduction of RAID concepts & issues to these systems as practically every SATA ready board has some level of RAID offered on it.

Evesham confirmed that the M/Bd is RAID ready. BTW when you phone Evesham Sales in working hours you get straight through to a real human being and I found him extremely friendly, helpful and knowledgeable. My call was initially to ask about the progress of my husband's order(in build)and then I asked him about my own requirements. I suppose as the machine will be set up and ready to go bar the last part of Windows install which is always left to the consumer I need not worry about drivers, compatibility and such things and in any case I am about to embark on the new LearnDirect A+ 2003 course and the syllabus is much better than the old one and I am sure that at the end of the course I will be quite happy about SATA, RAID et al. and disk management has been covered to some extent in the Server 2003 MCP course and in my previous W2K Server course only SATA was too new then.

I must admit all the same I am a bit worried about having two disks and am a bit scared I might do something to render the machine unbootable! Do you think the setup discs manufacturers always provide take into consideration that you have two disks if you do need to do an emergency repair or reinstall? I admit I found some of the stuff about different types of disk configuration like mirror, RAID, stripe and whether to use basic or dynamic disk a bit hard to follow in the Server courses and hope the A+course goes into this a bit more as it's a tech course.

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.. I admit I found some of the stuff about different types of disk configuration like mirror, RAID, stripe and whether to use basic or dynamic disk a bit hard to follow in the Server courses..

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Some of the conceptual stuff is most confusing ;)

I was about to write a big page of waffle :D .. which bit here is confusing you ? ..

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Last edited by MorseLady : Today at 10:44 AM. Reason: Computer sent befpore I was ready can modertor delete please

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Hey I didn't know it did that :D .. I never gave a reason, I always just deleted it myself by editing my own post, ticking the 'delete message' radio button, & then pressing the 'delete this message' button

I'm off to test that now - just to see .. :D .. (edit: )yeah you can still delete your own in this way :thumbs:

As you can see I have deleted the post that sent itself! Thanks for info.

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I was about to write a big page of waffle .. which bit here is confusing you ?

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The lot.......................guess ther Spring weather has got to my brain :rolleyes: