RoS said:
That's interesting. I've never found such a well argued critique of Raid 0
before and I'm frankly surprised that the great majority of manufacturers
were adopting this configuration not so long ago in machines with 2 hard
drives as if no other alternative existed.
Manufacturers, like software vendors, reserve and often practice their
right to be stupid
Which leads on to the question, what is the best configuration of 2 drives
and how should they in turn be set up?
My initial personal preference is to go for a dual boot arrangement with XP
on both drives and to treat one as a secure 'not to be messed with' set up;
the other as a 'let's see what happens if ' area. The reasoning behind this
thinking derives from past experience. The fun side of my computing
involves some digital photography and messing around with Flight Sim. There
are so many irresistible add-ons to the latter that sooner or later disaster
strikes when a bug infested add-on has been installed and the only practical
solution is to uninstall FS and start again. It would be good to have a
copy of a known stable version available, wholly independent of the other
which would be in the nature of a test bed. It would also be stress
reducing to have an independent storage area for photo images.
A drive image backed up to 2nd drive or USB drive and restore CD might
give you more security and flexibility. Drive image is compressed to
save space, can have many image copies from various dates.
http://www.freecomputerconsultant.com/acronis-true-image.html
Does this sound OK? And finally, apart from a chunk of the drive(s) being
set aside for data storage (again in duplicate as a backup) is there really
any advantage at all of having multiple partitions? The 'C' drive, with XP
on it, seems to end up with so many vital bits on it from just about
anything else installed - in the registry for example - that it seems
pointless to adopt the "keep the 'C' drive mean and lean and install
everything else on another partition".
RoS
Multiple partitions is sometimes advantageous for organizing data. In
the past there was efficiency (smaller data chunks used) in smaller
partitions. Nobody worries about that anymore.
Anymore, most seem to recommend just one big partition. Frustratingly,
if a 2nd partition is available to the OS, sometimes Microsoft will dump
a big temporary file there or Outlook's MSO cache without even asking.
Which means of course that malware can also access it; which is why a
USB drive that can be unplugged - even carried to another location, is
so nice.
www.FreeComputerConsultant.com