Hard drive organisation question...

[Arge]

Hi,
Am just about to do a fresh install of vista as I havn't done on this machine since i first installed vista over a year ago and things are geting a bit of a mess

anyway, I have a question about organising my harddrives...

I use this machine for Games, Audio storage (itunes) and video storage thats about it.

I have a seagate 640gb drive, a seagate 320gb drive and a USB External seagate 320gb drive I origanally bought for backup.

The two seagate internal drives (320 and 640) are exactly the same model just different capacitys

At the moment the 640 is being used for o/s, the 320 is empty and the 320 external is a mash of music, videos and files. This is because i chucked everything on the external to transfer from my old machine when i built this rig... that was a while ago

I was using the 640 for o/s as i thought it would be faster due to the platters being more dense but feel i am wasting its capacity with just the o/s !

- Would the 320 (internal) be much slower than the 640 for o/s ? (Same models, diff sizes)

- Should i split the pagefile to the other internal drive ?

I want to use the 320 external for backing up, bought this when all i had was the internal 320 so thought i could just copy everything byte for byte. I have never got round to using it to backup as its full of stuff !

- What backup program is best to use or is it a case of just copying everything across ?

- WHAT WOULD YOU DO ?

Sorry for the long post but I feel the more info i give the more ppl may be able to help

thanks guys

 

[JonJ678]

This is well not what you're expecting, but what the hell. I would find out what drive is in the external, and if it proves to be sata then:

Rip out the external drive, put the 640gb in its place. Raid 0 the two 320s. Set up a backup system between the two, probably a compressed image of the raid partition after installing programs and running dd if=/dev/zero on the rest to aid compression and something based around rsync running every evening to back up files.

You get:
Lots more speed
Two volumes of the same volume, ideal for backups
To take apart an external enclosure

Id have the page file on the raid, not surprisingly.

Copying byte for byte but piping through gzip is how I back up most things.

 

[Arge]

woah thats confusing !?

sorry, have no experience with raid. when you say...

Set up a backup system between the two, probably a compressed image of the raid partition after installing programs and running dd if=/dev/zero on the rest to aid compression and something based around rsync running every evening to back up files.

...I have no idea what you mean !

 

[Namak]

@JonJ678 - would you really recomend using 2 old differnt make and model drives to RAID?

@Arge - if the 320GB and 640GB are the same make and model then they should be the same speed. its Platter density that affects the speed and the platters will be the same only the 320GB will be single platter and the 640GB double platter. Would be pretty sure this would be the case but may depend on what the make and model is!

 

[Arge]

Thanks Namak,

So maybe i should use the 320 for o/s, applications and game installs then i can use the 640 for pagefile and as mass storage for itunes music and videos etc.

What program should i use so that i can backup my music/vids off the 640 and my documents etc from the 320 easily ?

Also a quick question about moving the pagefile to the second drive, do i need to make a partition for the pagefile on its own or just slap it straight on ?

 

[Arge]

bump

 

[JonJ678]

Good call on the bump.

@Namak, sure. Quite happy recommending mismatched drives for raid 0, it'll go at twice the speed of the slower drive. I hear hardware controllers can be picky, so perhaps someone who does it that way will contradict me. I use raid through software, which is a lot more resilient but doesn't cope very well with dual booting. In case a summary is useful,

True hardware => dedicated raid card, best performance
Motherboard raid => same performance as sofware raid, but invisible to os
Software raid => same performance as motherboard raid, very visible to os

@Arge, you probably dont want raid 0. But it would be a lot quicker than normal if you set it up. Only makes sense if you use the two 320 disks for it, which does mean cracking open the enclosure after checking what drive is inside it.

For backups, you can save an image file of your entire hard drive, compress it and store it on another drive. If it all goes wrong and breaks, you can delete everything on your main hard drive and copy the image back across. A bit like system restore except rather more brutal and this one actually works. This can be quicker/easier than a new windows install since all your programs will be already installed.

The other type of backup is incremental, so every night you save your 'my documents' folder to another drive. If disaster strikes, you then have yesterdays copy rather than none at all. rsync is software which does this extremely well, but is command line based. There is probably a mouse-clicking equivalent that I don't know about

 

[SoC]

@JonJ678 - would you really recomend using 2 old differnt make and model drives to RAID?

Hardcore raid people know that a failure may be caused by a manufacturing fault in the drives themselves. That is why they recommend using the same size but different manufacturers.

 

[JonJ678]

Close! Hardcore raid people know that matching drives give better performance, but the two drives from the same batch are likely to fail at around the same time

So when using redundant raid systems, they buy the same drive from several different places, thus achieving drives as identical as possible while keeping them different enough that a dodgy batch won't bring down the raid. Doesn't matter so much with raid 0, if anything you'd like them to fail at the same time

Less mental ones do as you suggested