how are your hard drives setup?

[nageov3t]

probably a repost, but I need some inspiration 🙂

previously, I had drives setup as:

1 x 64gb SSD (OS)
1 x 750gb sata (game installations, gave saves, MP3's, documents)
1 x 750gb sata (dvd rips, downloads)

my SSD died this weekend, though. and while I could just slice space from one of my sata drives, it has me thinking about re-doing my drive setup, perhaps for some redundancy. I've been meaning to get a raid setup forever, and it's ironic that I have very minimal backups considering that I make my living managing server backups for a hosting company :hmm:

I'm kinda thinking about:

2 x 80gb sata (RAID1 - OS)
2 x 2TB sata (RAID1 - data, large program/game installations)
1 x 3TB external (monthly backups)

but I'd still love to hear how other peoples desktops are setup. I don't really game too much anymore, so I'm not feeling a super compelling argument to replace my SSD with another SSD given the price difference ($30 for an 80gb sata drive vs +$100 for a 64gb ssd), but I'm also curious as to which drive brands people have found to be more reliable than others. I went budget on my ssd and it led to the drive dying after 18 months.

 

[YBS1]

My main machine that I game on looks like this,

1 x 240GB SSD (OS, Programs & select non Steam games I happen to be playing at the time)
2 x 128GB SSD's RAID 0 (Steam Drive)
1 x 1TB WD Black (Games and Steam overflow)
1 x 640GB WD Green (General Storage & Downloads)
1 x 2TB eSata External Drive (Acronis True Image Backups)
1 x 5.5TB Windows Home Server (Pretty much everything is backed up and/or stored here)

 

[mnewsham]

probably a repost, but I need some inspiration 🙂

previously, I had drives setup as:

1 x 64gb SSD (OS)
1 x 750gb sata (game installations, gave saves, MP3's, documents)
1 x 750gb sata (dvd rips, downloads)

my SSD died this weekend, though. and while I could just slice space from one of my sata drives, it has me thinking about re-doing my drive setup, perhaps for some redundancy. I've been meaning to get a raid setup forever, and it's ironic that I have very minimal backups considering that I make my living managing server backups for a hosting company :hmm:

I'm kinda thinking about:

2 x 80gb sata (RAID1 - OS)
2 x 2TB sata (RAID1 - data, large program/game installations)
1 x 3TB external (monthly backups)

but I'd still love to hear how other peoples desktops are setup. I don't really game too much anymore, so I'm not feeling a super compelling argument to replace my SSD with another SSD given the price difference ($30 for an 80gb sata drive vs +$100 for a 64gb ssd), but I'm also curious as to which drive brands people have found to be more reliable than others. I went budget on my ssd and it led to the drive dying after 18 months.

With my next build i plan to go:

120GB SSD (OS)
4x1TB HDD (RAID10 -Applications, games, everything else)****
2TB External HDD (backups)


I just cant go back on SSD, If i could afford it i would go with a PCI SSD card even. IMHO an SSD drive is a requirement at least for the OS and should be in any new build over $1k and should also be on the priority list of upgrades for people who dont have one.


****I probably wont keep the RAID10 array I just want to see how it performs and with the low price/GB for mechanical drives i want to see the numbers i get with that. If it doesnt work out then i will probably have a RAID 0 setup and make frequent backups.

 

[nageov3t]

after spending just a few minutes shopping, I'm surprised at drive prices... the difference between an 80gb drive and a 320gb drive on newegg is like $1 ^_^

 

[mfenn]

but I'd still love to hear how other peoples desktops are setup. I don't really game too much anymore, so I'm not feeling a super compelling argument to replace my SSD with another SSD given the price difference ($30 for an 80gb sata drive vs +$100 for a 64gb ssd), but I'm also curious as to which drive brands people have found to be more reliable than others. I went budget on my ssd and it led to the drive dying after 18 months.

I can't believe that you can even stand using a mechanical hard drive as your system drive after getting used to an SSD. Unless your SSD was really really slow. 😱

If it were me, I'd definitely get a new SSD like a Mushkin Callisto Deluxe.

 

[nageov3t]

I can't believe that you can even stand using a mechanical hard drive as your system drive after getting used to an SSD. Unless your SSD was really really slow. 😱

If it were me, I'd definitely get a new SSD like a Mushkin Callisto Deluxe.

I can definitely notice the difference, but at least for my needs, it's not so great that I can justify spending $260 on 2 ssd's versus $70 on 2 sata's (given how crippled I feel right now with a dead drive, I'm feeling like a RAID1 setup is going to be mandatory for my new setup)

once my box has booted up, I'm not doing anything particularly drive-intensive. mostly my desktop is used as a file server to stream stuff into my living room (typically using my netbook or xbox as a medium) and working from home, which is just a matter of connecting to my work servers via remote desktop.

 

[mfenn]

As a fellow sysadmin, I'd sure that you're aware that RAID is for uptime, backups are for disaster recovery. I'd just get a single SSD and do nightly incremental images. Your mean time to restore a 64GB volume should be around 10 minutes.

 

[nageov3t]

As a fellow sysadmin, I'd sure that you're aware that RAID is for uptime, backups are for disaster recovery. I'd just get a single SSD and do nightly incremental images. Your mean time to restore a 64GB volume should be around 10 minutes.

uptime is kind of my concern.

losing the data on my OS drive is annoying, but ultimately, there wasn't anything super important on there. even my desktop folder was remapped to my D drive.

but on the flip side, now I'm unable to work from home until I buy/install a replacement drive (whereas if I had a raid setup, I could continue sleeping late and working from my second bedroom while waiting on the drive to ship 😛)

 

[mfenn]

losing the data on my OS drive is annoying, but ultimately, there wasn't anything super important on there. even my desktop folder was remapped to my D drive.

That's probably why you didn't notice too much performance difference. You really want the core of your user profile to be on the SSD because that's where a lot of the random reads and writes happen (AppData specifically).