After formatting my c drive due to a crash, I am considering making a partition for my operating system. What is the best way to do this concerning what files to put on the OS partition and where to find those files? How large should the partition be? Any other concerns that need to be considered?
My c drive is on a raid 1. I plan to backup the partition other than the OS to my current D drive. My drives are 250gb each. Thanks in advance.
John
Posted by Gene Lugo on September 10, 2007 at 5:23 AM
Common practice is to use physically separate drives for system and data fliles. I would suggext a smaller drive for a C - 50 to 100 gb. After you have installed all of your software on it you can move the "My Documents" folder to another drive. If you use the two 250 gb drives in a striped array (Raid 0, no parity) where you will get greater capacity and read/write speed at the risk of data loss if a single drive fails. The safer alternative with two drives is to mirror them (Raid 1, no parity), where you end up with the same capacity as a single drive - since the data is simultaneously written to both drives, the loss of one drive does not result in data loss. If you have the room for it, this is a great arrangement for the system drive - you can never put in too much fault tolerance. If this is a computer used for a business and the files as well as the continued operation of the computer is "mission critical" then fault tolerance all the way around is the best solution, which would mean Raid 3, 4 or 5. Here the data is written to 3 or more drives, striped for performance, and with a drive for parity, A single drive failure does not result in a service interruption or data loss. Hope this helps.
Discussion
1 repliesMy c drive is on a raid 1. I plan to backup the partition other than the OS to my current D drive. My drives are 250gb each. Thanks in advance.
John