Hi Folks, Over the past few years I have been trying different configurations for my hard drives and partitions. I now have a new system and would like to gather some opinions on which method is best for downloading. Heres the scenario: 3 Drives... Drive 1) Partition 1 - System/Program Files Partition 2 - New Downloads Drive 2) Partition 1 - Personal Documents Partition 2 - Media / Storage Drive 3) Partition 1 - Back Up (System Image & Important Files) OR Drive 1) Partition 1 - System/Program Files Partition 2 - Media / Storage Drive 2) Partition 1 - Personal Documents Partition 2 - New Downloads Drive 3) Partition 1 - Back Up (System Image & Important Files) I don't want the media/stored files to be on the same drive as new downloads because many new downloads end up trnsferred to the storage area for keeps and its faster/safer to transfer drive to drive than from partition to partiton. Also will new downloads be faster if they are on: A) same partition as system. B) Same drive different partition. C) Different drive altogether. Thanks for you listening to me gabble on. I value your opinions. Regards, Roy
Well try this. 1) 2 Western Digital Black label hard drives either 750 gb 0r 1 terabyte setup in raid 1(Mirrored). For your operating system. That way If one should go bad then you can just replace the bad one without any down time. Be sure to choose 2 different models of hard drives. That way if one model has a defect from the factory then by choosing 2 different models then the chances of both failing at the same time are slim. 2) 2 2 terabyte hard drives setup in raid 1 mirrored for personal files and storage. Make sure they are higher quality ones and not the blue label or green drives. Try once again to find western digital blak label drives of different model numbers. 3) 1 750 gigabyte hard drive for downloading. a seperate hard drive for downloading will help save your raid. this drive can be ran hard for things like downloading without affecting any of your other drives. 4)1 blu ray burner( I prefer the LG lth and verbatim media)for Archival Purposes That way you can kinda have a hard copy of files. 5) I like gigabyte motherboards. So i normally get one at 100 dollars or 150 dollars with as many sata ports as i could possibly get. The boards also have a 3 year warranty straight from the factory. The thought that downloads would be faster if done on the system drive is no longer valid. I download at full bandwidth to seperate drives with no reduction in speed at all. I remember that azureus back in the day had an issue with this but this problem no longer exists. So use a seperate drive for downloading. also there really is no reason to divide the hard drives up into different partitions. If the drive is gonna fail its gonna fail. Multiple partitions wont save your files. also there is nothing like running into an issue where you have to partitions at say 200 gb each and both are almost at maybe 190 gb each but you have a 20 gb file and now you have to split that file to fit it into two partitions.
Well thank you for taking the time to give me some feedback. I Usually have the system partitioned to around 150gb, as I don't normally exceed that with applications. This speeds up time taken to defrag the system. At the moment I have a P8P67-Pro which is littered with sata sockets. I will look into getting some new drives and running them on Raid. I've been considering it for a while but with what you have written it makes sense and will save me on carrying out back ups in the same way as I do now. Once again, thanks for the feedback. Regards, Roy
