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Joined: Jul 2004
Posts: 9,931 Likes: 34
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We would have never guessed. Working your way through college? 
Greg Fretwell
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Joined: Mar 2008
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Thanks a lot for your comments guys.
As far as I'm concerned, this is one of two Windows computers I own, it has XP, it has 4GB of RAM, it is the computer I mainly use for important things.
I want the new SATA disk drive to be a seperate drive to C:
C: is partitioned into C and D drives, E is the CD ROM Drive
F is the USB stick I sometimes use to add stuff from "outside", it also shows up as G drive, after I have plugged it into my laptop, so that letter is not available.
I don't want striping or anything like that, because if one drive fails, it will take the whole array out, they must be independent of one another. you don't need to worry about the drive letter the OS automatically handles that
-Joe
“then we'll glue em' then screw em'”
-Tom Silva
TOH
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Joined: Jul 2002
Posts: 8,443 Likes: 3
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SATA is faster than IDE, but the drives themselves aren't any faster, so you'd probably never notice the speed difference. Steve, It isn't actually speed I'm after with this upgrade, I need more space, I'm down to about 12% in C drive and 8% in D drive. I'm going to try installing these devices this weekend and see how it goes. And don't worry, I'll still have my laptop to come in here and pay you fellas out if it all goes wrong.  
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Joined: Jan 2005
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It isn't actually speed I'm after with this upgrade, I need more space, I'm down to about 12% in C drive and 8% in D drive. Unless you have a reason or specific desire to keep it all in one box, you might consider external drives. USB-only ones are the most popular. But many stores (at least here in the US) have one or more triple-interface (USB, Firewire, eSATA) models. I have 9 of these in my setup.
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Joined: Jul 2002
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Unless you have a reason or specific desire to keep it all in one box, you might consider external drives.
No, Thanks for the suggestion, mate, but I'd sooner keep everything in the one box, at least I know where it all is then.
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Joined: Jul 2002
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Woohoo!! I now have a SATA DVD writer and a new 500GB of space to play around with. I did try the install yesterday, but for I had a couple of settings in BIOS mucked up (can you say crash and burn?). Got up early this morning and under the influence of hideous amounts of caffeine, managed to get things working properly.  RAID is not something I really need at this point in time, I've pretty much got everything backed up to the hilt, so if either the IDE or this new drive fails, I'm not going to run home crying to Mummy. Thanks a heap for all of you guys that gave very good advice, it's most appreciated. Mike. 
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Joined: Jan 2005
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RAID is only useful if you need to ride through a hard drive outage with no downtime. That's redundancy. Another form of redundancy I often practice is a whole mirrored machine ready to take over. Or it can even be live all the time for certain protocols like DNS and NTP servers.
We can live through the inconvenience of a few hours or even days downtime if a drive or machine fails. But the backups (plural emphasis) are important.
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Joined: Jul 2004
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RAID was really designed for AS400 type machines where the loss of one drive meant the loss of the whole storage array (basically everything on every drive you have). It was then picked up for servers where even a backup every night doesn't prevent losing a day's work. Now I suppose all server racks are RAID. We used RAID 5 where you have up to 11 drives in an array and you can lose any one without any loss of data. It is hot swap and automatic resync so the system never burps. You just get a message on the console telling you to replace a drive.
Greg Fretwell
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Joined: Jan 2005
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RAID, however, will NOT protect you from errant programs destroying the data stored on the array. Drop a database or format a partition, and it's done across the array. If a drive dies right after that, replace the drive and you still have a dropped database or a formatted partition. Backups and utterly crucial and RAID is never a substitute for backups.
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Posts: 57
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