Partitioning Strategies - Sata Drives

[Robert Neville]

I just bought two SATA 200GB hard drives and need some advice on
partitioning strategies. Several questions come to mind, so we'll
start with some background. My desktop currently has one 60 GB and one
30 GB IDE drive The two drive and two DVD-R occupy all IDE channels (I
think). The system also has SATA motherboard support and 6 pin
firewire .

Initially, I purchased these two drives with the rationale of placing
one hard drive in an external enclosure and another in my desktop
tower. The external drive would allow me to access some larger files
(like video files) on both my laptop and desktop while away from my
home network. The laptop has a 4 pin firewire cable (& USB 1.1). But
all firewire/USB enclosure only accepts IDE drive; not SATA drives. A
SATA external enclosure requires additional cards on both the laptop
and desktop.

Now, I must decide on whether to remove the old drives; placing one in
the external enclosure; installing the SATA drives in the tower;
creating a RAID stripe or mirror; number of partitions & partition
sizes; and finally on the cluster size.

1) Does anyone market a SATA to IDE connector? So I could place the
SATA drive into an IDE external enclosure.

2) What happens when I remove the IDE drives from my desktop tower
setup? Does XP boot up with just SATA drives (or do we have similar
situation like removing the floppy drive a couple years ago)?

3) Do I create a RAID stripe or mirror? Does this lessen the total
amount of disk among the two SATA drives (400 GB)?

4) How do I calculate partition space effectively? Basically, I intend
on creating a spreadsheet to help strategize a partitioning scheme. My
setup will be complex having over 10 partitions with multiple OS (blah
blah blah!!). My partition strategy may change many times before
applying the final scheme.

My questions relate to effectively and efficiently setting up large
amounts of storage space. These questions do not relate to using FDisk
or Partition Magic. Basically, I have to decide how much space to
allocate to XP, Linux, My Documents, MP3, Backup Images, and Video
(hence, divide the pie in a more precise manner).

 

[Shailesh]

Yes, you can get SATA to IDE converters, but I heard they are
unreliable, and they are big, so they might not fit in an external
enclosure. I'm surprised that there are still no SATA external drive
enclosures.

http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=sata+to+ide+converter

You'll have to transfer your XP system to your new SATA drive. You
could try xxclone.com or some other imaging software. Then change the
BIOS to boot from the SATA. (may be called SCSI in BIOS)

2x 200GB RAID-0 stripe total capacity is 400GB; faster than single
drive but lower reliability

2x 200GB RAID-1 mirror total capacity is 200GB; same speed (or
slightly slower) than single drive, but much higher reliability

How you set up partitions is a personal preference. I prefer to have
one OS on one large C partition, and then I just organize everything
by folders and send backups to a second drive. One thing you could do
is check the minimum/recommended install size of each OS, and make
sure those partitions are big enough.

Can I just take a moment to remark that 200GB is an amazing amount of
data? I mean, that is roughly 1,600,000,000,000 bits of data.

Regards,
Shailesh

 

[Clint]

Can you advertise in your local newsgroups about a swap (SATA -> IDE)? If
someone in the newsgroups I frequent offered that swap for my 200GB Seagate
IDE drive, I'd think seriously about it. And then you'd have the IDE drive
you want for your enclosure, and I'd have a SATA drive for internal use, so
everyone would be happy, right?

I can't answer your question about the SATA boot order, but as far as mirror
vs. RAID goes, here's a thought. If one of your RAID 0 drives go down,
you've lost all 400GB of stuff. Half of a RAID 0 array doesn't do you any
good, as far as I know. So you've basically doubled your risk of losing
everything. But you will get higher performance. If you mirror (RAID 1),
you would be halving your risk. Of course, neither of these approaches will
help with careless file deletions, viruses, etc, since what happens to one
drive will happen to the other. So don't think that by using RAID 1 you'll
be able to cut down on your backup. All it means that in the case of a hard
drive failure, you can be back up and running relatively quickly.

BTW, I've tried the divided pie approach before, but not with so many
partitions as you're thinking about. In the end, I've found it to be more
trouble than it's worth, so I've gone back to the whole pie. It always
seemed like I was running out of space on one partition or another, and then
you've got to figure out where you can put any application or large data
file, and then when you want to find it again, you've got to figure that out
too. Throw in a wife who is not exactly technically talented, and it's just
no fun anymore. I use my computer to organize things at home, not TO
organize. It's a little different when you start throwing Linux or other
OS's in the mix, however. There's my $0.02 worth (CAD). The divided pie
was also before my 200GB HD got installed. Maybe the extra space would have
helped, but I've found my data expands to fill available space...

Clint