Do you think it would be worth it to get 2 40gig WD/Maxtors and RAID them?

[magomago]

I've been thinking about doing that recently mainly for college...I got a 80 gig WD SE and space wise I'm sboslutely fine...I have plenty of space...

but college is starting soon and it makes me kind of nervous to have essays, reports just laying on the HDD - so I started thinking of getting perhaps 2 20gig or 2 40gig (the cache wouldn't even bother me) 7200RPM wd/maxtors and stick them in RAID1 to protecft the important data...

But then I started I to think whether I should then just reinstall windows on that raid1 stripe because I doubt I could fill up ONE gig for college info...but would my preformance suffer a lot?

or should I just create a 500 meg parition ( i currently have 40gig for windows,20 for anime,6 for linux) and then get one of those USB drives and save files on both thumbdrive and HDD....

the main reason I worry of a serious harddrive failure is because the dorms at UCI have no air conditioning and my computer (specifically my moniter) puts out a lot of heat...I might even think about underclocking rather than overclock because I don't want to just lose work...

What do you guys think? I can pick up 2 40 gig 2 meg cache drives for around 30-40 if I pay attention in the weekly ads....or should I get a thumdrive for 30 dollars and live with that...

or should i get another 80 gig and raid1 them?

Or would it be possible to setup a 500 meg parition on my current HDD and then try to raid it with another 500meg parition on another 80gig SE...and still leave the other 79.5 gigs as a seperate "F" drive?

Thanks for your opinions if you choose to share them

 

[DaveSimmons]

You can always backup without RAID, using a second hard drive (internal or USB) or a burner or thumbdrive. RAID just saves you from having to copy & paste the file.

For something like class papers copy & paste is actually better than RAID1 since then (if you change the name) you keep a sequence of all of your old drafts, instead of relying on the one copy that Word will trash the day before it's due, or one copy where you accidentally delete 5 key paragraphs. RAID1 also doesn't save you from a virus or trojan.

Also, running 2 internal drives will increase the heat -- a burner will too, but only when you're actually using it.

 

[AngryKid]

I like the speed you get from a RAID-0. I'm not sure your college documents will be worthly of a mirror, though

You only need to keep them safe until you hand them in. After that, it's for posterity. While you are working on them, copy them to a zip or network drive (your school will probably give you some space). After that, archive them to CD.

I usually just posted an updated copy to my e-mail everytime I made significant changes, and it worked fine. After I handed it in I kept an updated CD-RW.

 

[EeyoreX]

I agree. RAID1 for backup is a little overkill. Plus, IMO, that's still not real backup until you actually backup to a removable storage medium. Someplace seperate from your PC. What happens if surge kills both your RAID hard drives? No more backup. I'd use a CD-RW and just backup to disk. Heck, for papers and such you could use floppy to backup if you only needed the backups for a short period (I don't trust floppies for long-term backup). If you have enough space, buying 2 new hard drives would be a waste of money. Just backup to some removable media and a network drive if you have access. RAID1 is way more than what is needed here.

\Dan

 

[m1ke101]

ZOT ZOT. Incoming freshman I presume? It doesn't get very hot at UCI so you don't really need to worry about the no ac thing. I kind of worried about that before I moved in because I assumed socal = hot, but its not. What I would do is just get one of those usb storage things (I have a 128mb one) and just save whatever school stuff on there. That way if you want to work on something on a different computer, it'll be really easy. Your current 80gb hd should be fine. Oh yeah welcome to UCI.

 

[Bleep]

Heck if you got a cd burner on the machine just load up InCd and use a rewrireable cd as a big floppy and save everything to it.

Bleep

 

[MDE]

For all of my projects and essays last year I used Yahoo Briefcase. I think you get 30MB of space (upload cap of 5MB at a time) and it's FREE! Can't beat free my friend, plus it's offsite and accessible anywhere with an internet connection. I still played it safe and had a floppy copy, but Briefcase was my main way of getting stuff to school to print, cuz I'm too cheap to buy useless things like printer ink .

 

[magomago]

Yes it is incoming freshman pressure But I've lived in Socal for four years (both by the beach and now in the inland empire..) and it does get hot - maybe uci is more of an exception since its by the beach...

but thumbdrive it is...if you noticed my sig I do have a liteon48x burner...

the RAID1 was meant for harddrive failure....not for surge or something like that...but considering a few of you have said its overkill I'll trust that intuition...

Thumbdrives...hrmm

/me jumps onto hotdeals to check out if anything is sizzling.

16 or so megs should do it...no?

 

[0roo0roo]

get raid 1, nobody backs up religiously enough.... well most people don't have that level of insane discipline

then buy a dremil or hole saw and slice some holes in your case, put in low flow fans and get that case cooled.