partitioning

superscaper

Treacle wrote: »

thanks guys it is all becoming clearer now i hope.
preety sure what i am going to do regarding partitioning as i do not want to loose my pictures again music can be replaced my pics cant thats the downside of computors and modern technology i guess.

If you're talking purely in terms of backing up then partitions are not something to be relied upon for that. If your hard drive fails, you lose all the partitions on that drive. I certainly wouldn't rely on that as your main backup, nor RAID mirroring, I'd only consider it an additional backup method.
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=597170

robt_2

jje wrote: »

Does not matter what the size of the partitions are on any drive .

Though you said in first post the two drives are in a RAID set up so that will take space from both drives as RAID writes across both drives .
The bottom line is that you need a second partition to put a copy of the stuff on that you dont want to loose .
In my case this disaster backup is possible over kill with stuff copied to a partition also backed up on a USB drive and some further on to cd . Depends how critical the data is . Hard drives fail usually when you have forgotten to back up stuff .

jje

No, you do not 'need' a second partition whatsoever.

If the RAID is set to mirror, both hard dries will be identical, and if one fails, the data will still be on the other.

Partitioning is not an alternative to backing up, or to RAID.

PROLIANT

Unless you running Raid 5 I would not recomend setting your disk at Raid 1 because this will have an impact on speed and performance, Raid 5 requires at least 3 disks 1 for parity data and the others for data storage, is faster than Raid 1 but idealy you should use a seprate disk for the O/S and one for the data, even back up to tape drive or DVD or external HDD just incase.

Treacle_2-2

so from what i am reading here there are no rights and wrong on partitioning it is just a matter of prefrence? will definitly copy photos onto a disc as i cannot replace them unfortunatly.
proliant i have ordered raid 1 raid 5 was not an option.

Conor_3

Correct...it's all down to personal preference and how you use your computer.

PROLIANT

Well yes there is an element of personal preference here but if you don’t follow certain industry standards i.e. use Raid 5 for speed/redundancy and use Raid 0 and partition ergo you will lose your data, however if you use Raid 1 you will suffer performance issues, there is no logic or practical use of partitioning a mirrored array, if it is an organisational unit that you require then use folders.

BillScarab

Partitioning is pointless unless you have multiple OS'es. As Proliant just use folders for organising your stuff. That's what they're there for.

To be honest the difference in performance with a RAID 1 (mirrored) setup wil be negligible and it will be much more secure in terms of not losing your data. However you still ened to backup, if your PC gets stolen it doesn't matter how many copies are stored on it you've still lost them.

jje_2

Partitioning may be pointless ??.
All i know is that if the OS gets broken i dont lose my data as its not on The C partition . But i do lose it if that drive breaks except its on a partition on a different drive .If that drive starts to fail then i can copy over to the other drive .
Suits my style of working and thats often the only reason for doing something . Individual preference over technical mumbo jumbo .

jje

robt_2

jje wrote: »

Suits my style of working and thats often the only reason for doing something . Individual preference over technical mumbo jumbo .

Earlier you said:

The bottom line is that you need a second partition to put a copy of the stuff on that you dont want to loose .

What happened to individual preference there?!

PROLIANT

But the moral of the story is redundancy; if the physical disk fails then you have lost everything. Raid 5 gives you more flexibility and a good trade off between redundancy and speed.