250Gb Backup drive - should I partition it?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ian Roberts
  • Start date Start date
I

Ian Roberts

Hi

Just looking for some advice.

My cousin wants a second (bigger) drive for data backup.

I've suggested a WD2500JB.

Are there any reasons why I shouldnt just format it (NTFS) as one big
partition?

Thanks

Ian
 
Hi

Just looking for some advice.

My cousin wants a second (bigger) drive for data backup.

I've suggested a WD2500JB.

Are there any reasons why I shouldnt just format it (NTFS) as one big
partition?

Thanks

Ian
Click to expand...


FWIW, I say Don't partition it if it means that any single backup file
will be a large percentage the free space on the disk. Let me
expalin.

I've had a big partition (150GB) that I've been doing image backup to
for about a year. My backup images are as big as 45GB and since the
backups run unattended I've never paid any attendion to how long they
take.

I just happened to look at that partition with a defrag tool and found
it HORRIBLY fragemted. Thousands of segments per file. A modestly
fragmented backup image isn't going to cause any significant problems,
however this file system was so badly fragmented that copying an image
to another disk took a couple of hours. It was slowing down the
backups and at some point I would find that they were still running
the next morning.

I've played with a defrag tool (PerfectDisk) on this partition. I
realize that the free space isn't big enough to make a copy of the
largest file, so it doesn't get defragged.
 
Back
Top