One drive or two

**MorseLady** · July 19th, 2008, 03:49 PM

Choice one 750GB hard drive or two physical hard drives one 500GB and a second 250GB.

Question can I use the bigger drive for storage without running an OS on it and use the smaller drive as my system/Vista drive or would I be better off with the 750GB drive and a data partition?

**NooNoo** · July 19th, 2008, 04:11 PM

two physical drives. I always build with two drives, one for backup and library files, the other for day to day use (split into OS partition and data partition).

Answer to your question 250GB is more than enough for an OS and data partition with the 500GB as backup and library storage.

Remember though back up means that it's the second copy of the data, not the only copy!

**MorseLady** · July 19th, 2008, 04:25 PM

Noo I have just looked at the options and I see I can have the drive whichever way round I want so I would choose the smaller one as the first physical drive as it will be the system drive and the larger one as the storage drive.

I was not intending to use either drive as storage backup but your idea is a good one. Options for photo backup were a USB hard drive or carry on using DVDs. If I decide to backup on the same machine then maybe two 500GB hard drives. My photos are getting to be a big problem because my Fuji S9600 camera is 9.1 megapixel and I keep it at the highest and best res which is nearly 5MB per JPEG photo. Forget RAW I would need a couple of terrabyte drives! Like with the processor maybe I should go for as much hard drive space as my credit cards can afford

as I don't want to be buying a new computer in two years' time. This XP Pro machine has 200GB hard drive and my backup XP Home machine is 160GB hard drive and both are nearly full up.

**NooNoo** · July 19th, 2008, 04:36 PM

Right, so you need a dvd burner and burn the images to DVD and make a library back up of them and store the primary copy of the photos on the larger storage drive.

Hard drives die - having a 5 year warranty ain't much good if you can't get the data off of it without spending couple of thousand quid. So no, you can't give up the DVDs... USB drive is fine as long as it's not the only copy of the photos.

**MorseLady** · July 19th, 2008, 04:46 PM

As with all my computers it will have two DVD burners. I will carry on backing up to DVD then and store one copy of the photos on the bigger hard drive which I will reserve for photos. I will partition the first physical drive into system and data.

I take it I only need to run an OS on one drive?

**NooNoo** · July 19th, 2008, 05:02 PM

Yep, the second drive is just storage. If the worst happens, you can still install windows on the second drive. The board you are talking about seems to have raid (although the mesh version might be different), but if you are ordering two drives, make sure you don't order raid unless you want it.

**MorseLady** · July 19th, 2008, 05:10 PM

Originally Posted by NooNoo

if you are ordering two drives, make sure you don't order raid unless you want it.

Why is that Noo? Does having a board with raid and having two drives not raid create problems? I would avoid raid anyway as I never understood it when I did my City and Guilds Level III Networking and Systems Management on Server 2000 a few years ago.

**NooNoo** · July 19th, 2008, 05:17 PM

no, I mean you don't want them configuring raid for you because you then cannot use the drives separately as you wanted to...

Raid 101 - think of a sponge cake layer as one drive. Now stack the sponge cake layers together...you can have quite a few as long as they are the same size and type, you can make a single tall cake or you can make two identical cakes (mirroring). You can take the sponges apart, but then you ruin the cake....

**MorseLady** · July 19th, 2008, 05:25 PM

Thanks Noo that was a very easy to understand explanation.

**NooNoo** · July 19th, 2008, 05:28 PM

Originally Posted by MorseLady

Thanks Noo that was a very easy to understand explanation.

If only all IT Teachers could bake a fatless sponge cake.....

**MorseLady** · July 19th, 2008, 05:31 PM

With NTFS filling

**Platypus** · July 19th, 2008, 06:01 PM

Originally Posted by MorseLady

With NTFS filling

LOL!

**Matridom** · July 20th, 2008, 02:46 PM

Originally Posted by NooNoo

no, I mean you don't want them configuring raid for you because you then cannot use the drives separately as you wanted to...

Raid 101 - think of a sponge cake layer as one drive. Now stack the sponge cake layers together...you can have quite a few as long as they are the same size and type, you can make a single tall cake or you can make two identical cakes (mirroring). You can take the sponges apart, but then you ruin the cake....

Wow, I'm now hungry....