Re: RAID, SCHMAID.......

Stupid George <cg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote
sublimeone <davidpatrickwelch--@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote

No. That's not a very compelling argument for raid.

i've learned that it's not so i'll work with two separate drives.
Should i partition the c: drive into c: and d: (c for apps/games
d: for the os) and then a separate e: for media?

The lettering is undesirable, better to have C for the OS.

Almost always yes.

Fraid not, hardly ever in fact.

Some tips:

Don't make C: too big. But you do want to allow for growth and
always be running with more than 20% free space in any volume.

And its quite hard to predict that, particularly how that will change
over time. And risky to change it later without a full image backup.

Be as disciplined as possible about
putting user data of every kind elsewhere.

Complete waste of time. And risky too because that config
will never be as comprehensively debugged and so can bite.

When it is a manually configured PC I like to have C: imaged
or cloned so if there is a problem you can be back up in minutes.

You cant do that if the OS and apps are in separate partitions.

I also like to keep logs of what was installed or updated and keep them
with & in the system images so I know exactly what's where & done when.

Wota waste of time.

It helps in troubleshooting, & routine as well as non-routine
restores. Furthermore you need to back up these images
elsewhere. Just having a system image somewhere is not a backup
- it's a point-in-time snapshot which can go poof like anything else.

Mindless stuff. The real problem is that a complex system like
Win can make changes without you be aware of those changes.

C: & the C: image set is always being altered
as needs change or updates come out,

And the system keeps track of how you use the system.

and its purpose is solely to save the time to reinstall & reconfigure.

Pity that just saving the OS partition wont do that, you have to
save the D partition too to be able to do that, and so they might
as well be in same partition so you cant forget to save them both.

IMHO it doesn't make sense to try to coordinate that with your
personal data (a different animal entirely). For one thing system
restores via images are destructive. So D: and above are user
data which are backed up through a different, more traditional
file type backup approach with some retention.

That just complicated things for simple
users and isnt likely to be done reliably.

Really I'm suggesting you give thought from the beginning about
using partitions as well as folders to help organize how you
generate, backup & restore all your data. This sounds obvious,
but so many ppl make a mess of things esp with today's big drives.

You dont necessarily need to backup ALL the data.

It's at this point some ppl start asking about a NAS or have a file
sever online. The idea is consolidation, organization, and online
duplicates of important files. It's typically unnecessary for a
single user but can often be of value for even small home networks.

And it can be a lot simpler to just put full images there.

Stay where you are now, though. Sort out your needs on a single
machine first. I'm just planting a seed that may never need to take.

I like to reserve E: as the first optical drive, but
that's just an old habbit/personal preference.

Makes more sense to reserve a later
letter for that with that many partitions.

As I do that, take advantage of labeling & drive letters to make things
easy to remember & navigate. Sounds obvious but little things help.

Some of us dont bother with the letters anymore for that.

Give some thought to having temp files & folders or
the files you "chew on" on the second disk (or projects
divided among the disks) for performance considerations.

Complete waste of time with modern systems.

The world's moved on.

Through planning you can reduce being bogged down
by Disk IO with certain kinds of multitasking, etc.

Hardly ever with modern systems.

This is where you can get some extra peppiness outside of or in addition
to what raid or 10K+ drives or other new drives bring to the table.

There is no table.

There was prior reference in this thread to using the second drive for
backups. Having just a second copy on a second media is insufficient.
Furthermore any online media is subject to a host of potential data
jeopardizing problems. So maybe instead of a second drive you want
2 second drives in drive trays or enclosures.

No thanks. Most of them flout the drive standards and even
when they dont they are too hard to cool reliably and quietly.

Maybe you want more than that kind of minimal
protection, i.e. Grandfather-Father-Son, etc.

Not necessarily for the OS/apps partition tho
with modern OS that support restore points.

IMHO these types of considerations, plans, & work habits are far more
important and contribute far more to productivity (& your sanity) than
ATA Raid 0 or SATA II 3gbs. They are also technology agnostic.

No they arent.

These decisions you make can be applied to any workstation storage type.

They arent necessarily practical with some.

They hopefully will stay with you as core
computing practices & will evolve over time.

Yours arent evolving with the OS capabilitys.

So much for your "is raid0 worth it" type question.

Good luck.


.

Relevant Pages

  • Backup strategy
    ... > I have a Windows2000 Pro desktop, and I created a backup job to daily ... Partition one of the drives into 4 partitions. ... in your mirror hard disk as your only hard disk to make sure that it boots ...
    (microsoft.public.win2000.general)
  • Re: RAID, SCHMAID.......
    ... And risky to change it later without a full image backup. ... The old images would still be good. ... Pity that just saving the OS partition wont do that, ... Having just a second copy on a second media is insufficient. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage)
  • Re: .NET Framework question
    ... But have had problems with clones in the past so I don't use ... as a slave after the format, it acts as a separate partition because it is. ... you will see that I wrote "backup images". ... required to make the images to be kept on the external drive. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: another Time Machine thread - still need SuperDuper?
    ... I was thinking of making the partition the same size as the Mac's boot ... experience with Time Machine, and someone who has a similar usage ... Machine backup looks like a complete copy of your data, ... I have two identical hard drives which I'll be using ...
    (uk.comp.sys.mac)
  • Re: questions on partitions for exchange
    ... If your backup is using the exchange backup API, ... build process that starts with a FAT partition and then converts it to NTFS. ... The second local RAID 1 with the SMTP is fine if this is not a cluster. ... Because of the limitation on the number of physical drives, ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.setup)