Advantages of a seperate hardrive?

[Ilikepiedoyou]

I am building a new machine, I have lots of music though and am wondering if there are any advanategs to sotring this on an external or seperate HDD than my operating system and programs?

 

[biostud]

external can be moved around and you'll get more space for storing files 🙂

 

[Seekermeister]

The best reason to store music and files on a separate drive, is that if you have to reformat the OS, you don't lose your music, etc.

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

Well... my own personal reason for having multiple drives:

I have a few drives in my system. I keep important files on two harddrives and a backup copy on DVD-R discs.

My OS drive basically just has programs and various other crap that I wouldn't mind losing. In the even that I need to reformat, I can just wipe my whole C drive and not worry about my important stuff. You could accomplish the same thing with a partition, but if my OS drive were to physically fail, I still wouldn't really be losing anything important.

Having my important stuff on a couple of physical drives means I'm less worried about one of my drives dying. Just recently my old 80 gig died, but I lost nothing and didn't even need to break out the DVD-R discs to do any restoring since I had the stuff I needed on a different drive. I bought a new one and stuck it in and copied the files that I had "lost" from the 80 from my other drive and now I have a backup of everything again.

(I have a 120 as OS and a 120 and 320 for storage)

 

[Aluvus]

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
The best reason to store music and files on a separate drive, is that if you have to reformat the OS, you don't lose your music, etc.

Though you could accomplish the same thing with separate partitions on one drive.

 

[NuAlphaMan]

Originally posted by: Aluvus

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
The best reason to store music and files on a separate drive, is that if you have to reformat the OS, you don't lose your music, etc.

Though you could accomplish the same thing with separate partitions on one drive.

Yes, but I find my separate drives tend to last longer than my OS drives.

 

[mc866]

Originally posted by: Aluvus

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
The best reason to store music and files on a separate drive, is that if you have to reformat the OS, you don't lose your music, etc.

Though you could accomplish the same thing with separate partitions on one drive.

Not really if you have multiple partitions on a drive and it fails you lose all the info not just a single partition.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: mc866

Originally posted by: Aluvus

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
The best reason to store music and files on a separate drive, is that if you have to reformat the OS, you don't lose your music, etc.

Though you could accomplish the same thing with separate partitions on one drive.

Not really if you have multiple partitions on a drive and it fails you lose all the info not just a single partition.

...the 'data' drive is just as likely to fail as the 'OS' one (well, maybe a little less likely if it's not being accessed as much). And with two drives, you have twice as much chance of one of them failing.

Basically: it doesn't make a difference in terms of data survivability if you deal with partitions on one drive or partitions on multiple drives. Although with two physical drives, you could keep copies of critical data on both drives, which would help.

 

[Aluvus]

Originally posted by: mc866
Not really if you have multiple partitions on a drive and it fails you lose all the info not just a single partition.

Seekermeister was refering to the ability to (intentionally) reformat the partition holding the OS without losing other data.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: mc866

Originally posted by: Aluvus

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
The best reason to store music and files on a separate drive, is that if you have to reformat the OS, you don't lose your music, etc.

Though you could accomplish the same thing with separate partitions on one drive.

Not really if you have multiple partitions on a drive and it fails you lose all the info not just a single partition.

...the 'data' drive is just as likely to fail as the 'OS' one (well, maybe a little less likely if it's not being accessed as much). And with two drives, you have twice as much chance of one of them failing.

Basically: it doesn't make a difference in terms of data survivability if you deal with partitions on one drive or partitions on multiple drives. Although with two physical drives, you could keep copies of critical data on both drives, which would help.

go RAID1!