Windows XP Home Backup Functionality & Hard Drive Setup

[Guest]

All,

I am going to set up my PC with two 80GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drives in RAID 0
configuration. I should get some good speed with this setup. My question
concerns the size of the backup. I will have two 80GB hard drives which will
give me a total of 160 GB for programs. I know RAID 0 is risky, that is why
I am going to take an old IDE hard drive, put it in an external enclosure and
use that as my backup drive. I will have Windows write the backups to this
disk.

I have an 80GB IDE hard drive that I can use for the external enclosure, but
will this be big enough? I will just tell the backup utility to copy
everything over from the C:\ drive. Do I need to buy a 160GB IDE drive, or
will the 80GB be big enough. I guess this concerns the compression ratio of
the backup program and I guess it is better to have more space available than
less space, but I wanted some input from someone who probably knows more than
me.

Also, if one of the RAID hard drives goes kaput, is it easy to restore the
backed up data?

Thanks,

George

 

[Frank]

All,

I am going to set up my PC with two 80GB 7200 RPM SATA hard drives in
RAID 0 configuration. I should get some good speed with this setup.
My question concerns the size of the backup. I will have two 80GB
hard drives which will give me a total of 160 GB for programs. I
know RAID 0 is risky, that is why I am going to take an old IDE hard
drive, put it in an external enclosure and use that as my backup
drive. I will have Windows write the backups to this disk.

I have an 80GB IDE hard drive that I can use for the external
enclosure, but will this be big enough? I will just tell the backup
utility to copy everything over from the C:\ drive. Do I need to buy
a 160GB IDE drive, or will the 80GB be big enough. I guess this
concerns the compression ratio of the backup program and I guess it
is better to have more space available than less space, but I wanted
some input from someone who probably knows more than me.

Also, if one of the RAID hard drives goes kaput, is it easy to
restore the backed up data?

Thanks,

George

The windows back up will not recognize the external enclosure for the
restore.
I tried several times to do this. I had to purchase Drive Image.
(others just
as capable or available).