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HD Upgrade advice please

N

nbarb99

Senior member
I have a 30 GB hard drive that's about full. I've been working with digital video and plan to do a lot more of it, so I need to get a new drive.

I'm planning on hooking on the new drive as a slave (probably) and doing the digital video stuff there and keeping the OS and most programs on my 30 GB drive (which is 5400 RPM.. 🙁)

I was looking at some Western Digital 80GB drives and they look pretty nice, but then I thought of something... I always read that you're supposed to do backups, but I never have. It's not that I don't want to do them, it's just I don't have a good medium to back up 20-25GB of data. If I had a DVD writer I could do it, but I only have a CD-RW drive and I'd need something like 35 700MB CDs to back up my data. 🙁

So then I thought.. I could get two new hard drives and hook them up in a RAID 1 configuration so I have an instant backup. Sounds pretty good, except it at least doubles the cost and I don't have a whole lot of $$ to spend on this upgrade.

So, could someone recommend a large, fast, stable, and fairly cheap (sorry, I know those are tough requirements 🙂) HD and RAID controller? Or some other solution?

Thanks a bunch,
nbarb99
 
You don't need RAID, you can always do the copying manually. A Promise 100TX2 or 133TX2 PCI non-RAID card goes for $30 new or about $20 shipped in the FS/FT forum from someone who got it bundled with a hard drive. A Promise RAID card is about $75. If it's not RAID the drives can also be mismatched, like a 80-120 GB work drive and a 40-80 GB backup drive.

For the drives, look in Hot Deals for the latest deals, or just go to newegg.com if you hate rebates. WD is a good choice, especially the 8MB with 3-year warranty. Samsung's drives are cheap and the reviews I've seen are positive.
 
I don't know if you really need to go to a Raid system. But if you do upgrade to a larger drive with 8 mb of cache, I would suggest that you use a utility like Norton Ghost to copy your current drive over to your new larger, faster drive. Then simply switch the jumper on the new drive from slave to master, and set it up as your primary drive. Make sure that everything is complete on the new "master", and then reinstall your old drive as the slave. You can then even format your old drive and use it exclusively for storage or backups or programs, whatever. By using the new larger faster drive as your primary drive, it will give your system a nice boost. It should even boot more quickly. I have done this a couple of times. The 7200 rpm drives with 8 mb of cache work really well. I have both the WD 80 gig SE and a couple of the new maxtor 80 gig 8 mb cache drives. Choose the Western Digital if you want the 3 year warranty, go for Maxtor for the ATA 133 and a 1 year warranty. I usually just buy the best deal, which is why 2 of my systems have the Maxtor and only 1 has the WD. Both brands are working fine, so far.
 
As the others have mentioned, RAID is not what you want. RAID is not meant to be used as a data backup method. It is meant to protect you from hardware failures. In RAID 1, if you screw the data up on one drive, it gets copied to the second drive and now you have 2 copies of the same screwed up data. How useful is that? 2 drives is the easiest way to backup data, but it is smarter to either buy an external USB/firewire drive or a 2nd drive and a removable drive bay. This way you can manually backup the data when you want to, then remove it from the computer to prevent the data from getting corrupted by a virus, power surge or something else.
 
ATA133 = marketing gimmick, so don't use that in your decision making process

as Pariah said, RAID is for hardware failure protection, not data backups

You don't want to use the 5400 RPM drive as your boot drive if you're gonna have a much fastser 7200 RPM 8 MB cache drive in the PC. Video editing will still be slowed because no matter what you do, it will need files from the boot drive... my recommendation, like novice's, would be to use something like Norton Ghost to mirror your current drive to the new one... then if you still want to use the old one, dump your video files to that drive after you've edited them and use it for storage.
 
Thanks for all the helpful replies everyone! I'm not going to go with a RAID setup after all.

Jeff7181: Yes, a 5400 RPM boot drive is pretty terrible. 🙁

I think I'll get a good 7200 RPM hard drive (WD 8MB "SE" of some sort probably) and mirror my 30GB so I can boot off of it. Then I can archive stuff onto the slave.

I might get another 40GB or so down the road too.
 
Might also be a good idea to ONLY give the Administrator account permission to change files on the drive you're using for archiving... then when you want to backup, log into the Admin account and back up... that way a virus or something can't mess with the data on that drive.
 
What's the best choice for drive mirroring? I know there are a few (Norton Ghost, PowerQuest DriveImage, etc) and I've never researched them or anything.

Also, is it a good idea to partition my new drive? I would sort of rather keep it to 1 drive letter per drive but if it's important to do it I will.
 
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