Drive Consolidation

[Dorkenstein]

At the moment I have 4 mechanical drives and an SSD installed. 10 total partitions. It's pretty messy and confusing at times when I need to find something. I would like to streamline my drives. My first thought would be to remove 2 drives and replace them with 1 larger drive that can fit the contents of both. I'd also like to get a games-only drive thats fast and only put games on it.

I would probably get a 2tb drive like a WD Green and drop as much as I can on it while leaving some room, then I'd see what I could safely remove for storage. Are there any other alternatives? I'm also going to try to delete stuff and consolidate that way, but I'm kind of a file packrat. Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[sxr7171]

I used to believe in partitions. I no longer do. I like one system drive and one or many data drives. But ultimately I believe in using a system like WHS and keeping only data that is necessary on the system.

So my Win 7 desktop will eventually have one SSD and one 1TB drive only. The rest of the data is on the network.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Ah, see, I don't have a network to store anything on. I'd like to gut my drives and start over, really. No money for new drives for now, though. As it is, to update my SSD firmware I need to downgrade it 1 full version and that will erase all my data.

 

[sxr7171]

Ah, see, I don't have a network to store anything on. I'd like to gut my drives and start over, really. No money for new drives for now, though. As it is, to update my SSD firmware I need to downgrade it 1 full version and that will erase all my data.

I tend to look at forced reinstalls as a blessing in disguise. I can understand if someone else doesn't.

I would first backup my data on the SSD, and upgrade the FW. Then reinstall Windows and copy the data back.

These days I use Foxmarks to sync my bookmarks in Firefox and Windows carefully puts all relevant user data into each user's folder. That way restoring the data is very easy. Copy that folder for backup and restore from it.

After you do that I guess you can back up each drive one by one and format them and restore the data in ways that makes it easier for you to find. It's a lot of work but I think it will be worth it.

The alternative is to use Windows Search to find your stuff. It works very well.

Data organization is a difficult thing. But I like it more than cleaning my room.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Probably the best option. I am expecting a few hardware changes in the coming week. After that I'm going to re-install my operating system. Now I just need to know of a reliable, huge (2tb) storage drive and a nice fast drive for games that's 500-640gb. I think I'll just go for a WD Black on that one, though. I've always wanted to try raid but I think I'll pass on it this time yet again.

 

[her209]

It also doesn't hurt to have one of those docking stations if you handle multiple drives.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Any mechanical drive recommendations that are non-ssd and non-raptor for games? If there's nothing better than an F3 500gb or a WD Black 640 I'll probably go for one of those. Thanks.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

I also no longer believe in partitions. I always have at least two physical drives and keep all user data off my system drive so reinstalls are relatively painless. I always include the whole drive in the partition.

I would echo the recommendation to pull one of those drives out and use an external dock/enclosure for backups since you don't have any network storage.

And the F3s, Blacks, and 7200.12s are all top of the line for new drives.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Well, this sucks. I had one of my 1tb drives slide off the shelf and fall about a foot on to the floor. Picked it up and it seemed to work. Fired it up today in a usb enclosure and my largest partition is gone. Just gone, it asks if I want to format it. It kind of chirps when its on now, too. I don't think I can even remember everything on that drive, it had so much on it. I'll never get that stuff back. I feel kind of dead at the moment.

I might replace it, who knows.

 

[Gooberlx2]

I'm going to be reinstalling Win7 since the RC is expiring.

I also hate having my data split between several different drives...so I'm going to be backing everything up to a 2TB external USB (2x1TB drives, waiting for the enclosure). Then I'm going to setup the OS on a RAID0 and just use dynamic volumes and drive spanning on my other HDDs to make one large (~1.45TB) data volume.

Sure, it's not the ideal setup (I'd rather a RAID5 for my data volume), but I don't have the $$$ to spend on new drives. At least I'll have the backup in place.

Someday I'll get a new system (probably an AIO of some kind), and just turn my current one into a WHS.

 

[Dorkenstein]

I'm out of the loop, here. What's dynamic volume and drive spanning exactly? If I have to buy another drive anyway, should I get another 1tb and use a JBOD enclosure for backup or go for a new 2tb drive? Also, are you using USB or Esata? Thanks.

 

[RebateMonger]

Well, this sucks. I had one of my 1tb drives slide off the shelf and fall about a foot on to the floor. Picked it up and it seemed to work. Fired it up today in a usb enclosure and my largest partition is gone. Just gone, it asks if I want to format it.

Several months ago, my entire Hyper-V server, with three spinning 1 TB drives, fell two feet onto the carpeted floor. Everything seemed to be "OK", but it's obviously not a good thing.

That Hyper-V server has been turned off for a a while. Last night, I fired it up again. Everything was fine until I booted the virtual machine containing a "Windows Home Server". The entire server is contained in a single 900 GB virtual disk on a single physical 1 TB disk.

Well, WHS booted, but then reported a corrupted backup database. Then it rebooted itself and reported a missing NTFS.SYS. Not good, and it got worse from there.

WHS' 20 GB SYS partition is there, but the 880 GB DATA partition reports as RAW and wants to be formatted.

This is no big deal for me. I have a full backup of the whole server. And, after mounting the damaged .VHD file as a secondary disk on a Windows 7 machine, a quick "GetDataBack for NTFS" scan is able to see all the files. It looks like most of them are fine. I can play music, read text files, etc. So it looks like the majority of the files would be recoverable if I didn't already have a full backup.

This is a basic, non-RAID" volume, so data recovery is much easier than if it was part of a striped RAID array.

If your damaged disk is healthy enough to be read, and if your data has value, the first thing I'd do is run some data recovery software (one that doesn't write to the "bad" disk) and see what's recoverable from that damaged partition.

 

[Dorkenstein]

I should take advantage of the VHD mounting stuff. How do I make a vhd file? Right now I am using a free tool called TestDisk to copy off the most important folders from the raw partition. I don't know if it's destructive, but so far so good.

 

[Gooberlx2]

What's dynamic volume and drive spanning exactly?

Read here.

Basically, it's just a way for me to use software JBOD/Drive concatenation, since the integrated Intel controllers don't support it. If I lose one drive, the whole volume is lost.

The enclosure I bought is USB2 (this one). It's only a backup drive, so I don't need fast transfers, and it's well rated after 200+ user reviews.

What are your other drives? You could get the 2TB for inside the system and a JBOD enclosure for your others as backup. Or similar to what I'm doing, dynamic disks inside the system and the 2TB for external backup. 4+ bay enclosures are kinda pricey, so the latter is probably cheaper...but probably riskier as well.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Well, the one that's in doubt/failing is my Samsung F1 1tb. So I currently have a 64gb boot ssd, 640gb WD Black (Games), a 1tb Samsung F3 (quickly filling with backup data), and an older 750gb spinpoint with a lot of stuff on it.

It's true that I need to weed through and ditch some stuff, but not like this, haha. If the money is right I could get a 2tb and put the essentials there.

 

[RebateMonger]

I should take advantage of the VHD mounting stuff. How do I make a vhd file?

I had to mount my .VHD file because my Windows Home Server is totally contained on a 900 GB virtual hard disk (VHD), running under Hyper-V Server. In order to scan the virtual hard disk with GetDataBack, it had to be mounted using the "Attach VHD" option under Windows 7's Disk Management. This turns the virtual disk into a "real" disk that GetDataBack can read.

I'm out of the loop, here. What's dynamic volume and drive spanning exactly? If I have to buy another drive anyway, should I get another 1tb and use a JBOD enclosure for backup or go for a new 2tb drive?

One thing to be aware of about JBOD (spanning) with Windows Dynamic disks:

If ANY disk in the spanned array fails, ALL of the data on the entire array disappears from Windows. Windows has no native tools to recover any of the data. You can't simply replace the failed drive and get the rest of your data back. You'll need to use third-party data recovery tools to get back any of the data. Even the data on the "good" disks. Then you'll need to rebuild the entire array.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Two of the partitions on the drive now won't mount and they ask to be formatted. I could slow-boat through saving directories one by one, but is there a way, even temporary, that I can re-enable those partitions? Thanks.

 

[Dorkenstein]

All 4 partitions are now unrecognizable. The drive started buzzing. I don't nearly have all that I need off it. Is this the end of the road or can I try something else?

 

[RebateMonger]

All 4 partitions are now unrecognizable. The drive started buzzing. I don't nearly have all that I need off it. Is this the end of the road or can I try something else?

There's obviously a mechanical problem, since it started with dropping the disk. And it's apparently gettting worse.

If the data is valuable, then I suggest not running it anymore and getting it to a professional data recovery house that has cleanrooms.

If the data isn't worth a professional recovery, you can try making a disk image first and then attempt recovery on the image. This obviously has limits. At some point (which you may have already reached), consumer data recovery software stops working and mechanical fixes are needed.

As I understand it, the disk imaging portion of GetDataBack can be used without purchasing the license for the software.

http://runtime.org/gdbimage.htm

To actually do data recovery, you'll need a license for GetDataBack or will need some other brand of data recovery software. I BELIEVE that the .IMG file created by GetDataBack can be used with other data recovery software. But I'm not 100% sure.