How many Harddrives is TOO many?
Monday, July 31, 2006 by Jafo | Discussion: PC Hardware
Over the last few weeks my main 'backup' drive [a 160gig PATA] started to show signs of ageing ....the odd noise...the odd error about being 'unable to erite' [though it had]...so I thought it wise to get a replacement.
Yesterday I installed a 320gig WD SATA [16meg cache] to swap everything from the potentially ailing drive...and left a proggy called 'Syncback' to handle it overnight...[about 130gig in 330,000+ files].
This morning I checked the log and there were 12 files that failed to backup...so I ran it again for those....and now there were 2. Manual copy attempts also failed on these...'invalid dos command' or some such...the implication was/is they were corrupted - bad crc, whatever....neither was critical.
I'll schedule the backup to backup to the new backup once a week, leaving the iffy drive 'in the loop' for now.
But...
Doing a count I find I have now 870gig in 5 physical Harddrives [7 if you count partitions].
My system, if you include the PCI IDE card and ignore the SATA Raid can handle 8 PATA and 2 SATA drives, and if you count the CD/DVD drives has 5 PATA and 2 SATA.
2 of the PATA drives are small 80 and 60, and each has a 20 gig primary partition so both can be OS drives [one an image of the other] and each in removable caddies for quick recovery in the event of an OS going gaga.
So...the OS is backed up in a working state...
Once a week Drive Image 7 is scheduled to make a new image of the Primary...and that's stored on a third drive, and that too is backed via Syncback to a fourth [actually a partition on the second].
The great advantage of all these secondary OS drives, etc is that the 'proggy files' such as games and office data, etc are on neither of them but on the third drive [which is now redundancy-backed to the fifth [new] one in its entirety.
Now, with XP Pro and its product activation, etc about the only thing that can screw up all this 'protection' is a hardware failure requiring a new MoBo, etc and thus a new OS Install....
Unless...
I get myself a backup/spare of the 'same' MoBo and Processor as I'm using now.....just in case....
Or is THAT too much of 'The Irishman wearing 2 condoms - to be sure to be sure'....
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Reply #21 Sunday, September 17, 2006 6:31 PM
I have an 80, a 120, and a 160. I need more space. And speaking of time.... It takes my virus system, AVG Pro, about 1 hour to scan everything. And it takes exactly 9 hours to do a complete reformat of the 120. That's not fun waiting for it to finish.
Ummm, RAM (memory) and disk storage (hard drive)is not the same.
At the very least, data stored in RAM is volitile while data on your hard disk is not.