Can anyone advise me on the advantages/disadvantages of installing a second
drive. I currently run XP home on a 40gb hard drive and am considering
installing a second drive for business/personal use

Disadvantage, a little more power is required and that means
a little more heat to vent which means proper fans, etc. A
little more money is required.

Advantages, security, you can back-up to the second drive
all your data files, if one drive fails, your data is still
safe. RAID 1 on a PCI card or mobo will do it
automatically or software can do it. You can do it manually
too.

Faster operation, the computer can be set so the page file
is on the second drive, data can be read and written at a
faster total speed because the read can be on one disk while
the other disk is writing... this works best when you have
large disk caches... the advantage is often that the wiper
arm doesn't have to wait for seeks.





"Don Murchie" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:KXX3b.72661$(E-Mail Removed)...
| Can anyone advise me on the advantages/disadvantages of
installing a second
| drive. I currently run XP home on a 40gb hard drive and
am considering
| installing a second drive for business/personal use
|
|

"Jim Macklin" wrote:
> Advantages, security, you can back-up to the second drive
> all your data files, if one drive fails, your data is still
> safe. RAID 1 on a PCI card or mobo will do it
> automatically or software can do it. You can do it manually
> too.


All true, but one shouldn't consider mirrored data in
RAID 1 as "backed up". If you input an error to a data
file, it is immediately mirrored (duplicated) in the twin
data file and the "good" data is immediately lost. Consider
RAID 1 as improved data "integrity" and not backups of
previous versions that can be restored as current versions.
Periodic backups are still advised if RAID 1 is used.


*TimDaniels*

True, a simple explain always seems to omit some detail.
Thanks.

You can have apps such a WORD save back-up copies of changed
documents. Then RAID 1 would have the altered original and
the back-up.

I like to take a CD-R of MY Documents. A USB 2.0/Firewire
external drive is nice to have too.


"Randy Vikssten" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
|
| "Jim Macklin" wrote:
| > Advantages, security, you can back-up to the second
drive
| > all your data files, if one drive fails, your data is
still
| > safe. RAID 1 on a PCI card or mobo will do it
| > automatically or software can do it. You can do it
manually
| > too.
|
|
| All true, but one shouldn't consider mirrored data in
| RAID 1 as "backed up". If you input an error to a data
| file, it is immediately mirrored (duplicated) in the twin
| data file and the "good" data is immediately lost.
Consider
| RAID 1 as improved data "integrity" and not backups of
| previous versions that can be restored as current
versions.
| Periodic backups are still advised if RAID 1 is used.
|
|
| *TimDaniels*