help with HDD setup

soul_child · 21 Dec 2007 at 20:01

i've just bought 2 seagate 7200.11 500 gb drives and i currently have 2 7200.10 drives on my pc set up as separate drives containing the OS and games and appz.

I do the occasional gaming and web development and mostly watch tv episodes on my pc. I was thinking of using the 2x250 gb as backups and additional storage in a NAS enclosure, however i am not sure whether i should raid the new 500gb drives or just keep em as separate disks. anyone care to offer their suggestions as to how they would utilise the drives ?

thanks

soul_child · 25 Dec 2007 at 12:33

would it be advisable to go raid 0 on the 2 500gb and back up my entire disk periodicaly? how much space would i need to back up the array in case it needs rebuilding?

semi-pro waster · 25 Dec 2007 at 13:29

I probably wouldn't Raid0 the drives since you don't sound to be in the categories of people who benefit most from it (manipulating large audio/video/data files) and it is an added risk of data loss.

To back up the array depends on how much you have on it but in theory anywhere up to 1tb minus the amounts used for file system and the fact that hard drive and OS manufacturers view 1gb differently (1024mb = 1gb for an OS, 1000mb = 1gb for a HDD manufacturer) so it will be probably nearer to 900gb than 1tb overall.

I'd personally use them as separate disks, I've had Raid0 arrays in the past and while they haven't really caused any additional issues (other than through my own stupidity and experimentation) they didn't provide any hugely noticeable benefits either.

soul_child · 26 Dec 2007 at 12:09

thanks i think i will set them up as just seperate drives

C64 · 26 Dec 2007 at 19:48

I have always put games on c: without any partitions any other drives are for all winrar and deletion work data and so on.