Has anyone switched from using two drives to just one, but have it partitioned?

z0mbi3

z0mbi3

z0mbi3

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I've pretty much always had one drive for my OS and one drive for my downloads, however recently I've been considering ditching this method. I've been thinking about getting a 1tb eco drive and breaking it up into two or three partitions.

I know there's not so much resilience in there in the event of a drive failure, but the way I see it is that if a drive is going to die it'll do so early on it's life, and so long as you have a good backup strategy in place you should be covered anyway.

Has anyone else made this sort of change?
 
Depends what you use the PC for really but I've always run with a minimum of 2 drives, 1 for the OS and 1 for user data. My son does a lot of video editing so I also have a 3rd drive for temp storage etc so that the source and output files are on different drives.

Partitioning may offer more drive letters but it's still the 1 drive so still could be a bottleneck.
 
z0mbi3, do yourself a favour and only create two partitions. just manage the folders neatly on the second partition and you're sorted :)
 
bledd. said:
z0mbi3, do yourself a favour and only create two partitions. just manage the folders neatly on the second partition and you're sorted :)
Click to expand...

Sounds about right. I tend to keep them tidy anyway.

Only reason I'd considered doing three would be to keep a local backup separate.
 
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personally i keep an acronis image of partition 1 on partition 2 (and another drive)

then i robocopy certain dir's from partition 2 onto my icybox and network share.
 
tbh i`ve allways used 2 or more drives ..
1 for the OS`s , smallest, fastest scsi/SSD .
1 larger drive for games .
1 or more drives for files , d/loaded stuff , mp3`s , piccies , movies , game patches , etc...

kinda didn`t like the idea of all my eggs in one basket havin one drive ...

an seeing the drive that got hammered the most was the OS drive i`ve change a few of them out , but surprisenly the other drives seem to last .

but if you do stick with one drive make sure to partition it up ..

an hope the drive dosen`t fail .

an Back ups ...
 
I made the exact change you mention; I moved from a 74GB boot drive and three 300gb drives to a single 1TB drive. Unfortunately, that drive was one of the Seagate drives with the faulty firmware, and I lost ~600gb of films, tv series and music. As Mav points out, it's best not to have all your eggs in one basket. Of course, if you have a good backup strategy (which I obviously didn't) then it's not that big a deal having to recover your data.
 
Saundie said:
I made the exact change you mention; I moved from a 74GB boot drive and three 300gb drives to a single 1TB drive. Unfortunately, that drive was one of the Seagate drives with the faulty firmware, and I lost ~600gb of films, tv series and music. As Mav points out, it's best not to have all your eggs in one basket. Of course, if you have a good backup strategy (which I obviously didn't) then it's not that big a deal having to recover your data.
Click to expand...

rule of thumb, for each gb you buy, buy another gb for backup
 
Agreed, it was a foolish error, although not an uncommon one. I now have a SAN where everything is replicated to, so I no longer have a single point of failure in terms of hard drives. You live and learn, as they say :)
 
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