Comments on: Do You Have a Second Hard Drive?

By: Neogene

Neogene — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 11:02:22 +0000

My desktop: 1hd 250GB sata2

My laptop: 1hd 160GB

My shared hd:

500GB external usb hd (3,5”)
80GB external usb hd (2.5”)
250 external usb hd (ide 2.5”)
250 external usb hd (ide 2,5”)

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 13:25:23 +0000

Hi Tiffany,

When you said you had two external HDs, I thought you were going to say that you duplicated your data on each drive. How is simply separating the data that is important to you making you safe? The (admittedly anecdotal) evidence is that the more important your data is, the more likely you are to experience a drive failure. If you do not have some sort of backup procedure in place, the number of hard drives involved is essentially meaningless. You can pick up an external five hundred GB HD for next to nothing nowadays; I would suggest you copy the data from both of your drives to one big one on a schedule that would cause an acceptable level of anguish for files lost between backups. AND keep the backups off premises. That way, even if there is a fire, you’re covered. Also, don’t rely on regular fireproof safes/vaults as they are designed to protect paper which thanks to Ray Bradbury, we all know can stand temps of 450 degrees before igniting. Your precious data would be toast long before the paper succumbed in such an environment.

Take Care,

Dan

By: KiwiNth

KiwiNth — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 18:37:37 +0000

I recently bought a dell Dimension 9200 (my old beast died) and I included 2 x 500gb hard drives. I also attach an 80gb external hard drive hooked through a usb port that I back everything I do onto regularly. My theory for getting such monster drives?

a) I dreamed in science fiction days of actually owning a computer with a terabyte of storage – now I do.

b) I’m surely not about to run out of drive space for ANYTHING I use it for very quickly (lol).

By: Bryan Price

Bryan Price — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 18:19:53 +0000

I just built my latest. I finally got around to installing the old drives out of my old computers. My P3 just wasn’t doing anything anymore so I grabbed that 160GB drive, and the old 200GB boot drive from my P4. I made the 160 GB second drive the boot drive for my kids. So now I’ve got 320GB to go with the 500GB of my new system.

The 500GB is my first SATA drive I’ve purchased and used. I got it for the 3GHZ SATA II goodness, and find it comes jumpered for only 1.5GHZ! Sucker wasn’t easy to get out either.

Right now I’m cleaning ~~porn~~ old downloads and such off the two old drives. I plan on using them as backup drives when I’m done. Different controllers (so one of them will also have a swap file on it).

If we want to talk about external drives, I’ve just obtained a 2.5″ 160GB USB 2.0 drive. I’ve had too many failures with flash drives (probably gone past their write #s). And it’s USB powered, so I don’t have to drag a brick along with it. So it’s a little bigger than flash drive, and I have to bring a cable with it. but I don’t have to worry about updating it. And I spent as much on it as I would an 8 GB flash drive. It will be used for grab and go backup, among other things.

By: Dhensli

Dhensli — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:24:30 +0000

If you do stack drives in your old case you should add extra cooling; Windows instability is (apart from its built in features) a symptom of a hot hard disk. I’ve been there.

By: Ewen

Ewen — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 08:03:49 +0000

I’m currently running a total of 56 (yes, that’s right, 56) hard drives, totalling about 14 terabytes of raw storage capacity for my engineering research, simulation, and analysis storage.

Two of my systems are physically limited to carrying two (hard drives). Most are between 3-7. The biggest carries 17 hard drives.

With the exception of one older server, and workstations, I am currently working on completely phasing out SCSI hard drives in favor of bulk SATA storage. Future workstations will be built using SAS hard drives. I do not own or use (nor do I plan to own or use) any fibre channel hard drives. The advent of gigabit network, and SATA-2 renders fibre channel to be too expensive for single user bulk storage application.

By: Derek Tom

Derek Tom — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 01:34:05 +0000

If you’re scheduling a backup to a 2nd HDD (or doing any backup), I suggest making sure you use backup software that’ll backup open/locked files. That way you can be sure i.e. that your Outlook PST files are backed up successfully while Outlook is running. 2 backup apps that I have found that do that well are Super Flexible File Synchronizer (http://www.superflexible.com) and SyncBackSE (http://www.2brightsparks.com). Super Flexible File Synchronizer can even do byte-level backups to speed up backups of very large files so i.e. it will only backup changes within a 2GB+ Outlook PST file (it won’t wipe the 2GB backup file and then backup the entire updated 2GB file).

By: Tiffaney

Tiffaney — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 18:58:14 +0000

I actually have 3 hard drives. Since I have a mac mini, I had 1 internal hard drives and 2 external hard drives. I use the internal hard drive only for installed programs. Since I have a photographer and graphic development, my data is very important to me. The 1st external hard drives us used for personal data (i.e. music, downloaded videos, downloaded software, and personal documents). The 2nd external hard drive is used for all my business needs (photos, design documents, things of that nature).

I prefer to be safe rather than sorry.

By: Dale Lowery

Dale Lowery — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 17:30:05 +0000

I think I installed my first D: HDD in the early days of Windows95! And today!! With prices what they are it’s plain silly to NOT have an extra 200 to 500 Gigs for safety. These days I have an older machine on a LAN with nearly a terabyte of storage for backups and images. I’m not a gamer, so speed is not a factor for me! But the LAN is on cheap Gigabit NICs.

Lockergnome has been one of my favorite resources since…??? Long time ago!

Keep up the good work!
Dale

By: Karl Schultz

Karl Schultz — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 05:21:01 +0000

The two-disk configuration where you put your vital (”original”) data on the second drive is a good idea as long as you are disciplined about it. A lot of software still insists on placing data someplace on the “C” drive, often in the application’s install directory. Not an impossible problem to work around, but you still have to fight it all the way and pay attention.

Also, having all your vital data in one place makes it easier to back it up properly to an external drive, CD/DVD, or whatever.

I’ve given up on this method because I’ve never convinced myself that I’ve left nothing valuable on the C drive. Also:

Another thing to watch out for is that a user’s “home” directory is usually on the C drive, under Documents and Settings. (The “My Documents” folder is here too.) Aside from your settings, some applications will store data here as well. It would be nice to have everything under Documents and Settings on the other drive. Microsoft has an article about doing this, but it looks a little scary.

I wanted to add a comment to those already made about getting a new computer. When I upgrade to a new computer, the new computer invariably has a disk drive several times the size of my old drive(s). I often copy my old drives into folders on the new drive, so I have easy access to all my old data, in case I overlooked something while copying the things I *thought* I needed. Again, today’s cheaper and bigger drives make this possible. After a year or so, I may delete these folders and I still have the old drives on a shelf someplace.

I also like the other strategy of putting everything on C and then having a D drive that stores complete *images* of the C drive, using Norton Ghost or whatever. This protects you from both a catastrophic failure where you have to replace the C drive, and also the “oops” case where you need something that got deleted (and is not in the Recycle Bin) or is an older version of the same file. You are still exposed to the cases where the disk controller trashes both disks or the entire machine is a loss, but hopefully these are relatively rare problems.

The downside is that you have to image the disk frequently.

The backup scene for most personal computing is pretty dismal. I don’t think that anyone has come up with a solution that really works for the masses.

By: scott f

scott f — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 03:10:57 +0000

As I am always changing operating systems I use external drives for my important data. I am also a firm believer that if running multiple drives in windows systems alows multiple chances for viral infections.

By: Dri-Anna Davis

Dri-Anna Davis — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 21:54:23 +0000

Goodness, I reckon I must have a Hard Drive Fetish. That is….
I have five Hard Drives (All Segate Barracuda’s) with a total of 3 Partitions and 7 Logic Drives.
HD 1: 80 gig: System Only
HD 2: 200 gig: MY Documents, My Downloads & Document Catch All #1
HD 3: External USB 320 gig: Media (A to Zuit)
HD4: External USB 500 gig: Backups, Mirriors, Und’ Tings’ of Dat’ Nature
HD5: External USB 80 gig: System Clone via Sync Back with a caveat of course. Because a USB Drive must be set to Master, HD5 Is disconnected once my Daily Sync System is completed. Seems that if ya’ don’t disconnect and/or turn off the Power to the USB System Clone, it may/will cause a problem where your puter’ is not sure which is the primary system.
Y’All Live Long & Prosper…

By: Tammy M

Tammy M — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 18:02:38 +0000

I’ve been using two hard drives for years. It’s an excellent way of keeping files from being corrupted and I still have everything if I reformat. Just keep c for windows and downloads, check the downloads for viruses, then put them on d or whatever yours is. If something was corrupt when it went to the storage drive, that explains things. Just don’t reformat the storage drive-even go so far as to unplug it when reformatting, just to make sure you don’t accidentally reformat the wrong drive. (Did that once, and actually cried when I figured out what I had done!) If you reformat it, data recovery software might not recover it all.

By: Barbara Lamb

Barbara Lamb — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 17:39:25 +0000

In reference to your video about a second hard drive i would also suggest that a person keep their old c: drive when they upgrade their computer to a new hard drive that way when the current C: drive conks out they can stick the old c: drive back in the computer so as to access the files on their second drive during the time it takes to purchase a replacement drive.

On a problem note; I have never been able to get Outlook express speller to work. The speller is loaded and works in word but not in outlook express any ideas.

barbara

By: Joe Messman

Joe Messman — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 16:29:21 +0000

I disagree with you Chris. I would use the second hard drive for backup copies of my data. If you have your My Docs folder, for example, on your default My Documents of the OS drive, you backup those to the second hard drive daily.
You would not have to worry about reinstalling Windows because they are on the second HD. I know users who think they are “backingup” their files because they are on the second hard drive believe it or not. With the size and price of hard drives now you can’t go wrong.
You can also store images to the second hard drive and use something like Carbonite, or Idrive to backup online.