Windows using 2 drives

Col_M · 17 Jun 2009 at 15:53

Hi,
I currently only have one 5 year old 200Gb hard drive in my system. Although I have a server that regularly creates a backup of my computer I'm not too keen on keeping all my eggs in one basket so to speak. To fix this I'm looking at getting a pair of new drives, one for the OS and the other for storage.

The thing is that I've never let windows split its stuff over 2 drives before so I have a question. What other than My Documents (if anything) is fine to be moved over to the storage drive? I'm running XP at the moment

theheyes · 17 Jun 2009 at 16:41

It's a bit easier to back up if you have your home folder on another drive. It's really easy to do on XP. I personally just use my second drive/partition for files and do all installs on the primary. The problem with this is you are not really introducing any redundancy, just literally splitting things over two drives instead of one.

Another option would be to RAID1 them, putting all your eggs into two baskets so to speak.

Col_M · 18 Jun 2009 at 11:58

Thanks for taking the effort to answer.
By home directory you mean the one containing all the user junk like my documents right?

If I'm honest I'm a home user and don't really need any redundancy in my computer as I have a server that can just plop an image back onto the computer if and when needed.

One other thing I'm wondering about is if I have all my data on another drive and decide to upgrade XP to 7 as I want to I guess it's just a case of telling it where "My Documents" is right?

theheyes · 18 Jun 2009 at 20:26

Yeah, sorry, your Users folder, the one that contains your Desktop/My Docs/My Pics etc - I must have had linux on the brain when I wrote that.

The reason I mention redundancy is because in your first post you say you don't wish to keep all your eggs in one basket. Just so you know that if you split your data over two drives you're not adding anything in terms of safety for your files, as there will still only be one copy of each. But if you're backing up to a server you should be fine.

In regards to upgrading to W7, in theory yes, but someone who has actually done it would be able to give you a definitive answer. You should take a full backup before an upgrade anyway, so worse case scenario you'll just have to restore the files if something goes wrong.