My Drive Configuration

Thought I'd let you know about my drive config because it's pretty cool.

2 SATAs, 250Gb and 160GB

Both drives are partitioned to have 2 partitions on each; one 40GB partition and the other partition using the rest of the space.

The OS is on the first drive's 40GB partition meaning it uses the fastest portion of the drive (almost twice the speed of the end of the drive!) See http://www.tomshardware.com for example graphs. All my data is on the 2nd partition of that drive.

I install all my games on the second drive's 40Gb partition so that they load realy quickly. This could be slightly bigger I guess, but it forces me to complete games and then remove them.

Then finally I regularly backup my first drive's data partition to my second drive's second partition (the large one). This means that my data is safely spread over two drives, so I only really need to consider a DVD backup every few months or before I get a new system.

I thoroughly recommend this system setup.

Yes, thats cool.

Ive got 1x10000 40gb drive, and 1x120gb drive.
40gb drive is partitioned to 3gb boot+Pagefile, 37 as storage, (my website backup, emulators and my music and blitz programs). Drives C:\ and I:\

The 120? thats d:\, e:\, f:\ and g:\. 20 40 20 40.
d:\=Windows installation at start of drive.
e:\=Program files
f:\=Backup of I:\ (this used to be an Emulator drive)
g:\=Download files, installation files.

so you use speedy partitions too. Looks like you could do with a backup partition tho'

I have 1x 80GB (Primary) and 1x 120GB (Seccondary)

The primary is formatted with one 20GB partition, and one 60GB partition.

Drive 1:
20GB - Windows and Apps
60GB - /Games/ - for games and stuff
- /Documents/ - for the my documents folder
- /Libraries/ - things like ogre, irrlicht etc.

Drive 2:

10GB - Windows
20GB - Applications
30GB - Games
20GB - Documents
10GB - Backup

Drive 2 has around 30GB of crap space from someone dropping the drive. It still works fine otherwise, cept' Smart reports its fitness at 0% :S

Grey, yeah.. I cold do with another drive to backup my program files, however, everything i work on is on drive I:\, which is backed up onto f:\

I:\ is also backed up onto my mp3 player (Drive L:\ when its plugged in) since J:\ and K:\ are DVD drives :)

I burn most games to DVD when I didn't play them, so in most case there's about 2 game on my drive only....

And the apps takes few space, the most big one is Windows itself, took 2G including swap space.

Leiden

your backup drive shouldnt be on the same drive as your documents man. And get another drive ;)

Cyg: sorry I misread your details, I see that you backup I: to your 2nd drive, that's good enough.

LeidenK: Personally I think you are crazy using a potentially duff drive!

Yoxola: "burn most games to DVD", what the hell do you do that for, didn't they come of CD-roms/DVDs in the frist place, or uh, maybe not naughty.

Actually, I do that too with larger games- I burn the contents of the installed folder to DVD. then, if i want to play, i copy them back :)

OK, I'm so anally retentive I have a folder on my data drive called Saves, and when I finish a game (or stop playing it) I copy the save folder from the game into a named subfolder in the Saves folder. Then If I ever needed to reinstall or whatever, I just copy in the save folder and bingo, back to where I was before.

The problem with burning the installed folder, is many games put stuff in the registry so if you copy the DVD back on and run the game, it just pops up with an Install Now? window and you're like arg! all the data is already there dumbass. It's just the same when you get a new system and whack your old data/game drive into it, half the games don't work and need reinstalling! Bring back .ini files I say!

Of course for even better redundancy you can back up the data over a LAN to a drive in another computer if you have any in the house, in case your entire computer fries or something.

Umm.. yeah. And whats the chance of that happ*POP*


This user is now offline

>_

Grey, yeah, but at that point id reinstall anyway.

I burn off the hard drive onto a dvd, then back off the dvd. i wont uninstall the game, or windows, so i wont worry about it asking for an installation :)

Cyg: Why not just burn the save game folder to save time?

xlsior. If I had 2 PCs, I do the LAN backup method in case one of the PCs got nicked as it's very unlikely both drives will go kuput unless a PSU had a MAJOR failure. Where I used to work, I instigated a daily LAN backup and a monthly DVD backup of that data.

Of course there's always RAID but it's impractical for home use, all that wasted disk space!

Hi Grey,

on tip: You should always store your backup-hd at another place than were your source is, so use an external one.


Greetings,

taumel

Grey,

because it wouldnt save you much space.

Unless it was Metal Gear Solid 2 :/ (6gb save game within the first hour)

Hehe I know I shouldnt be, originally my PC had only the primary drive in it, My seccond pc recently died so its HDD is now im my one. I've been using the drive like that since October 2004 I've never had any problems with it at all. Its weird.

Oh, I have many games in download form, some Japanese (so called Doujin Games in the term), and the have no nasty protections, comes from Comic Market, so I can easily bun them into DVDs.

yox: I see
cyg: I see
Tau: I see, but why? Only through risk of fire/flood or PC being stolen?

Im using a couple of 80gb's, 1x200gb and 1x250gb

john: fat! (not you, you're drives)

Cripes! I only have a single 80gig drive and have only used 4.5gigs of that.

I've used 81 of the 250Gb and 128 of the 160Gb!

Wow. Do games take up most of that space? I don't have any commercial games installed, which helps.

Yep and stuff like that...i'm just used to keep backups (in your case local ones) seperate from the times when i was administrator at an agency. All these things sound weird till they happen but then you look weird... ;O)

Depending on the temperature inside your computer it also could be better for the life of your hd, less temperature, dust...


Greetings,

taumel

No, games take up 32Mb. I have Gbs of data that I've collected or made over the years (about 10 years). e.g. Code and associated files in many languages, tons of my own music mods and samples + other peoples, C64 games/music, Amiga games, utils, photos (loads), video (from camcorder), text, busniess stuff, webpages etc the list goes on. I've even got Doom, Duke3d and Descent in an old games folder as they are only MB big. Oh and backups of that data doubles it of course.