setting up raid config or or not?..Partions or not??

Question

setting up raid config or or not?..Partions or not??
i am going to get a 200gb internal HDD and a western digital 500gb external HDD and wondering if i CAN, and or should, go to a raid config. and or partion either one on them. i am new to this and want long-term data protection foremost!!.., backups(operating system) programs, pics,ect.....i am tired of crashing systems and starting all over. so i want to do this right and take all precautions for this build and get best proformance : ...ie: moving swap or paging file and O.S. to different partions. Basicly get the most out of the software&Hardware. any and all advice suggestions would ROCK!! thanks in advance

Answer 1

With the configuration you have the best thing to do is to is to have the main system on the internal drive and run regular incremental backups to the external drive (It is highly likely that if you buy an external drive it will come with a backup software). Internal drives are usually sit on the faster buses than the external ones, which will make your entire system run much faster.

In reality the question you want to answer is how fast you want to be back at work in an event of some sort of failure and how much you want to pay.

With the setup described above it can be a couple of days.



What can really work fast to to buy 2 (or more) identical internal drives and a separate RAID controller card (you need extra hardware to run an efficient RAID system). Then connect the drives to the RAID controller. The drives will have the same duplicated in some way (depending the RAID type) information. If one of them fails you can just power the system down, remove it, and power it back up - everything will be there. Then replace the drive with a new one when you can, the RAID controller will copy the data to the new drive automatically.



The real RAID system is more reliable, but cost more. Internal+external setup will cost less and take up less space (external drive can be used for some other purposes).



Have fun. Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I assume you plan to use the 200gb drive, with the 500gb drive for backups.



Instead of getting an external drive, buy yourself a computer at a garage sale for $50, and install a 500 gb *internal* drive in it, then plug both computers into your router. Internal drives are cheaper, so you'll spend about the same or a little less, and you'll end up with more reliability.



Set up three directories on the 500 GB drive - a, b, and c. Set up a backup program to back up the complete 200 GB drive every night, rotating between the three directories.



The biggest reason for crashes is not disk failure, but operator error. If you always have 3 backups, from the last 3 days, you will be able to recover easily.



Be sure to use backup software that saves the registry!

Answer 3

to run raid the drives have to be the same size , not brand ... theres no way to do what your talking about , because raid hits and reads from both drives at the same time