Building a new system and it's been a while

[staatsof]

I moved this from another forum

Ok so I haven't dabbled in building a new system for myself since 1998. I've upgraded a couple of things like the processor, disks etc. but now I need to start over. I can clearly see that things have changed, a whole lot.

I'm looking for general advice about how to proceed not specific vendor hardware/software selections. That comes next.

I'm not into gaming but I do take a lot of digital pictures and I'll also be doing some videos from my race car adventures. After barely surviving one disk crash 2 years ago I think this time I'm finally going to go the RAID route and the minimal mirroring option so that I never have to recover a hard drive again. I'm also looking for a better backup solution this time.

I need some help pointing me towards a motherboard that has a lot of the stuff I need on the board. Perhaps the Raid controller should be seperate but I'm not going to go for Raid 5 for my workstation so maybe an on-board solution is good enough?

I can provide more details as to what I need. I've built about half a dozen systems for myself and hundreds for work over the years but I retired from the IT industry in 2000.

Is anyone willing to have a discussion with me about this?

I've done some investigation about Raid and XP.

Question, can I even use Raid with XP professional or 2000 pro and have my boot drive as a part of that or is that a bad idea anyway ??

Thanks Bob S.


Reply from KWARKERS

I would be willing to have a discussion with you about that, but i dont know much about RAID. But I have always found the best way to come up to date with the latest info os to buy the annual buyers guide mags. And this time a year is wen they start comin out. Pick one up and they usually have a good deal of info for "beginners". Good luck with ur system

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B-rad
A64 3500+, Asus AV8-E-Deluxe, 2x512 Kingston CL2, Maxtor 160gb SATA, Winfast 6600GT PCI-Ex, Thermaltake Sonic Tower with 120mm fan

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Thanks for the offer.

I really need to figure out if RAID 1 can work and whether I'm willing to put up with the consequences so I think I'll focus on that first.

This time around data integrity and back up methods are going to be my primary focus.
I'm currently using Windows 2000 Professional and I may stay with that or go to XP. I'm not crazy about the installation restrictions of XP.

I'm thinking of implementing a simple 2 disk (80gb each) Raid 1 setup but I'm wondering if that's even possible unless the system disk is not a part of the raid system?

I'm also concerned about making recovery (non disk crashes) more complex than it already is.

I had a complete hard drive failure 2 years ago and paid $1500 to get the data back which I did. Never again! That was my fault of course but it stemmed from my backup scheme which became unmanageable. I used a 25 GB 4mm DAT and used GHOST to copy the entire drive (data portion) to tape. Once my drive exceed the capacity of a single tape I found out that GHOST doesn't span tapes. Now that drives are very reasonable I'm hoping to work something better out. Like disk to disk copy and offline tape or other backup of the copied drive? Looking for ideas here?

I currently have two partitions on a single drive with all of my data and apps on the second partition. I guess I could have a third drive just for the op sys and do a RAID 1 with the others.

From what I can gather so far this would mean that these drives would be spinning 24/7/365. That's noisey and draws a lot of power.

Can someone suggest another solution along the following lines:

I could live with a day's lost data. So if I could get an automated drive to drive copy periodically and an automated "changed" data backup daily.

I'd also be willing to have a seperate op sys disk if necessary.
Ideas ???????

Thanks everyone in advance

Bob S.

 

[Trey22]

As far as a backup solution is concerned, I use and love Acronis TrueImage. I have an external HD that I image my system to at 2 different stages... 1)After an OS install, 2) then after applying all patches and installing all my apps. I keep my data on a separate partition and also back that up to my external HD. This way I have my data in 2 different places and if my PC hard drive dies, it's just a matter of restoring an image and copying over my data (you could also image your data to begin with, leaving you with one simple restore procedure).

Of course incremental backups are important.

As for building a rig, are you more interested in reaching certain specs or maintaing the cost below a certain budget level? Also, it would be helpful to know what you would be using this for.

 

[staatsof]

Ah, you caught me part way through moving the message over so please read it again and thanks for your input!!!

I surf the web, store digital pics, use Word, email and will probably be doing "some" video down the road. If that requires another set of enormous drives I'm not sure what I may want to do. I'm not going to be doing movies but I also have some HI8 videos I want to move to DVD.

Most video will be 20 minute sessions from my racecar which I probably will want to edit then move to a DVD.

I'd also like to explore the idea of web surf only system tied to another removeable boot drive so that if I get clobbered it's simpler to fix with a drive copy????
Can this be done?

Bob S.

 

[Stan]

Your going way overboard from what it sounds like... Honestly I would skip RAID. I would instead get an external USB harddrive that is the same size, or larger than your internal HD, and backup *daily* (NTbackup under XPPro can do this).

Keep it simple (KISS) always provails.

 

[Somniferum]

I have a very simple backup system that has worked well for me. Basically I have an older 40-gig Maxtor internal drive that I use for backup. I keep all my important data (mp3s, documents, video, what have you) in one directory tree which I backup periodically to the Maxtor. Also I have my main drive partitioned into a 10-gig system drive and a 150-gig program drive -- that way if I have to reinstall Windows, I don't lose all my program data. While the Maxtor will fail eventually, odds are heavily against both drives failing at the same time, so either way I should have a working copy of all my important files if either drive fails. Then I will just have to replace the failed drive.

I have reinstalled XP several times by reformatting the system partition with no problems. Of course, there are a few games/apps that insist on creating registry dependencies so they refuse to run after an OS reinstall even though their directories are untouched, but there are workarounds for most of those.

 

[staatsof]

Originally posted by: Stan
Your going way overboard from what it sounds like... Honestly I would skip RAID. I would instead get an external USB harddrive that is the same size, or larger than your internal HD, and backup *daily* (NTbackup under XPPro can do this).

Keep it simple (KISS) always provails.

I've been on the simple route for a lot of years and it doesn't get the job done. Windows backup is pure crap. I want and need a better approach this time around. I'm not into reformat the HD, load the opsys then all it's patches, drivers etc. then the applications and their patchs then the favorites. This is an assinine sequence of things to have to do. It may be standard MS but it's still stupid. I've worked on big systems that did not involve MS and it wasn't this way.

Soooo, I'm looking for better solutions to minimize the standard MS drill. BG should be in jail for this crap but instead he's loaded.

The RAID 1 is because it's so cheap to do now but I'd like to hear about the downside that's not obvious such as recovery problems or not being able to boot from a RAID set of drives or what ever the problems might be.

I have seen people make reference to problems like this but so far it's not definitive to me one way or the other.

I already have the drives and they're cheap anyway.

I also know about proper backup proceedures with cycling the media and storing things offsite. I ran IT departments for 25 years. That's hard to do with harddrives as backup but I'm willing to listen to alternative ideas that have worked for other people.

So maybe automated partial backups to an external drive and then once a week a full backup to the drive and then a tape copy of that for an offsite or archival purposes???

If so, what sort of reasonably priced tapes are there now? My old 4mm DAT is clearly way too small and slow for the size of todays drives.

Does the drive have to be the removable type or can it simply be just another volume?

GHOST always involved taking the op sys down. I'd like to avoid that if I can. Certainly for the daily partial backups.

Once again thanks for any ideas you might have.

Bob S.

 

[staatsof]

Originally posted by: Somniferum
I have a very simple backup system that has worked well for me. Basically I have an older 40-gig Maxtor internal drive that I use for backup. I keep all my important data (mp3s, documents, video, what have you) in one directory tree which I backup periodically to the Maxtor. Also I have my main drive partitioned into a 10-gig system drive and a 150-gig program drive -- that way if I have to reinstall Windows, I don't lose all my program data. While the Maxtor will fail eventually, odds are heavily against both drives failing at the same time, so either way I should have a working copy of all my important files if either drive fails. Then I will just have to replace the failed drive.

I have reinstalled XP several times by reformatting the system partition with no problems. Of course, there are a few games/apps that insist on creating registry dependencies so they refuse to run after an OS reinstall even though their directories are untouched, but there are workarounds for most of those.

Well this sounds like one approach I might take as I'm already 90% of the way there.
I have the same sort of configuration except that I goofed and made my op sys partition too small.

It's amazing how it just keeps growing and I do try to weed stuff out but I'm probably just not expert enough in Windows to get everything cleaned out.

But I'm leaning toward making an individual drive for the ops sys so that I can copy it with GHOST or something when it's in a viriginal state (no jokes please) and then after each update. This would allow for a quick recovery but I would like to know if there's a way to have that copy of the system volume happen once a week with out taking the ops sys down and would also be bullet proof in recovery. YOU CAN"T DO THAT WITH WINDOWS BACKUP!

So maybe that has to be done manually and the data/applications volumes are automated?

Thanks

Bob S.

 

[timecop67]

I really like my DVD Ram disks the kind put out by Panasonic. They are not your ordinary DVD disks. Great for Pictures and data backup with a 100,000 rewrite capability and error checking. I like the format so well I now have 2 drives based on this format. You can buy the drive with or without taking the whole cartridge for better protection of your data. I keep one backup disk offsite and in a safe for safekeeping. I use the program Nero and the UDF file system (1.50) for the formating.

 

[staatsof]

Timecop67

Can you provide some details on how you are using the Iomega Super DVD and the Panasonic DVD Ram disks?

Data transer rate experienced?
Capacity?
Etc.

Thanks

 

[timecop67]

I use the Sony DSC F717 camera for my travel camera and using Jpeg the pics are usually between 1-1.5 megs a piece at the highest resolution on this camera. So if I fill this disk up I can expect about 3,000 pictures on one cd rom diskette. The standard amount is 4.7 gig but I think they do make a 9.4 gig cd rom drive.

I would get the Panasonic Brand or Verbatim disks and they usually run about 5-7 dollars for the full cartridge format. I've only used about a box of 5 so far and only a small data amount on them. Use is pretty simple.... just format in the UDF format that Nero provides and use their InCD program in your system tray and start dragging and dropping your files over.

Just go to pricewatch.com and type in DVD ram and look at the listings.

If I had to buy today I would get this drive here at Logicalplus.com because it takes
the full cartridge format. My iomega super drive and the non cartridge drives are cheaper but the disks are not as safe.

http://www.logicalplus.com/answ5xdvdram.html

Part Number: Panasonic SW-9574-BK
The new Panasonic SW-9574-BK DVD RAM drive offers the ability to burn a DVD RAM disc or DVD RAM cartridge at 5X, DVD??R DL at 4X, and DVD??R at 16X!
Panasonic's new PAN-SW-9574 DVD RAM drive is an advanced computer DVD burner that can be used with all the most popular DVD media formats such as DVD RAM discs with DVD RAM cartridge support, Dual Layer DVD, Double Layer DVD, DVD+R/RW, and DVD-R/RW with CD-R/RW support too!

As the industries fastest computer DVD burner, the PAN-SW-9574 is a popular pick among those who wish to quickly and safely use dvd backup to store computer data and DVD movies.
?@ ?@
Product Specifications

Type: Internal
Interface: IDE / ATAPI
Write Speeds: DVD-RAM 5X, DVD??R 16X, DVD??R DL 4X, DVD-RW 6X, DVD+RW 8X, CD-R 40X, CD-RW 24X
Read Speeds: DVD-ROM 16X, CD-ROM 40X
Buffer Size: 2 MB
Loading Method: Cartridge Load