Installing in a different partition

[dr_ml422]

Gotta give it to you Miles. There are so many variables and ways to see the advantages and disadvantages of this topic that it would drive one nuts, especially if if you're not experiencing any problems anyhow. I'm just really curious cause I have all this hd space now and apart from the 500gb hd which I use for my video work, I was wondering what to do w/it and the best way to do it. Now I definitely know why you decided to take a break from putting together and taking apart computers. Lol. I would of committed myself to an asylum by now behind all the intricacies involved w/this computer business.

Lil by lil I guess I'll just load more apps. and do more things and eventually it'll be revealed to me what works best. Thnx as always.

[MilesAhead]

Heh heh. One gotcha' I ran into when I went the route of installing Windows on a small C:\ partition and putting all my apps on another was the amount of free space. It seemed like I left enough but it's amazing how Windows expands the registry and system files as you install apps.

You may want to check into Raid Striping. From my limited understanding it's relatively cheap these days and has a checksum mechanism so that if one HD fails you don't lose data(sort of like Par files kind of idea I guess but I don't know that much about it.) From what I've heard when you write data it's split over the disks so thrashing is drastically reduced by design. But seek an authoritative source before diving in.

[Chewy]

You may want to check into Raid Striping. From my limited understanding it's relatively cheap these days and has a checksum mechanism so that if one HD fails you don't lose data(sort of like Par files kind of idea I guess but I don't know that much about it.)

don't confuse stripping with mirroring

speed and spreading data between 2 drives and thrashing and redundancy

[MilesAhead]

Perhaps it's only on business applications but I was under the impression that you could have say a 8 physical drive setup, and if one drive dies, the data could be reconstituted mathematically from the 7 remaining portions. To mirror byte per byte to another drive seems a bit extravagant.. esp. since when you put something bad on drive A it tends to get mirrored to drive B... but it's been a long time since I read anything on it so my impressions are probably obsolete by now.

El wrongo... I should've googled first.. sorry

This FAQ explains it succinctly

http://www.recoverdata.com/raidfaq.htm

[Chewy]

the 4 or 5 drive raid setups seem to be the norm, but are for advanced system admin or web server types with deep pockets

[dr_ml422]

Guys I won't be able to have access to the forum from Madison 5 at Mount Sinai. Miles, you're a million miles over my head and Chewy you're milleniums away. Would the best suggestion be to just delete the extra partition on the 250gb hd and put all my apps. there w/my xp os? The old adage that too much of anything can sometimes be no good has me a lil nuts. These yuppies here wish they had the xtra space I have on this pc. It would drastically cut down on the extra expenses of putting their crap in a Manhattan mini-storage. Lol... This is not an option>.

[Chewy]

Some of my data is too important to trust to just 1 hard drive, my system/boot drive is a generation 1 wd raptor 10K sata and it's only 37GB, I have it partitioned into a 15 gig system partition and I try to keep about 9 gigs free for temp vid files etc

the other 20 gig data partition has a few files that I keep 2 copies of and 5-15 gigs of video files I am working on, I never defrag that partition, my permanent files were defraged, the temporary data won't need it

my system partition never takes more than 2-3 minutes to defrag

[dr_ml422]

Chewy are your apps. on your 15 gig system partition? You know, any software you use for w/e. Thnx.

[Chewy]

right now I only have 1.05 gigs in my program folder

[dr_ml422]

right now I only have 1.05 gigs in my program folder

Sounds reasonable. Guess you do a lil video work at a time. There's a lot of debate about partitions in general. I think it was Major Geeks or some other site/forum where even there they couldn't come up w/something definite as to the advantages or logic behind having some.

BTW I googled that 37gb raptor you have. one of the first to venture into competing w/sata hd's producing results just as good for ata or pata as I understood. Lot of talk about their 3rd generation veloci-raptor. That's another 10 or 15 posts at the least.

[MilesAhead]

dr_ml422 data backup is another consideration. As Chewy is set
up he can restore his system partition very rapidly. In my case the
large data I work with is expendable so I can exclude it from system
snapshots. But if you had to take snapshots including multi-GB data files that
would slow down backup and restore quite a bit. Chewy's approach is likely
better in that case. I'm a downloader and I constantly install little
utilities to try them out so keeping a very tight system partition is kind of
a lost cause. If you're setting up a PC dedicated to particular work
you'd tailor it to that.

[dr_ml422]

Hi Miles. Chewy's approach is likely better in that case. Better in the case of restoring his system partition rapidly if needed and also any backup would be quicker also? Is that what you mean? Thnx.

[MilesAhead]

All of the above. I guess I didn't grok that you were doing dedicated video work. I often miss the obvious. Like, "anyone seen my sunglasses" and somebody replies, "dude, they're on your head" kinda' stuff.

[dr_ml422]

When you mention multi-GB data files when referring to Chewy's setup, how much are you talking here? He only has that 37gb hd and only does a bit at a time so it can't be much that you're talking about here cause then it not only wouldn't fit, but it won't restore or backup quickly like you noted. Confused here. Thnx.

[Chewy]

I have a 250 gig drive data drive too, it's where I keep over 100 gigs of semi temporary stuff

it was partitioned with potential system partition just in case

I use the 2 data partitions on seperate drives for reauthoring large video files

drive to drive takes a couple of minutes for 4+ gigs