What to do with 2 500GB hard drives

DancemasterGlenn · Post by **DancemasterGlenn** » Sat Jul 18, 2009 3:25 am

Pretty much what the title says. I had one drive, which died on me during the school year. I bought a new one in a panic, only to realize later on that the old one was still under warranty. I shipped it out today, so hopefully in a few weeks I'll have two 500 gigs. So... what should I do with them? I'm using about half of a drive right now, and while I'm sure at some point I'll eventually have more than 500 gigs of stuff, the death of the last drive has me leaning towards a dedicated backup drive. This is an area I know very little about, however (besides doing it all manually every so often). I'd prefer something automated.

Currently I'm using Ubuntu Jaunty... if anyone has any pointers on recommended programs or steps I could take to educate myself (hopefully not anything overwhelmingly technical, though I'll try my best with whatever you guys can give me), I'd be very grateful. I also hear about RAID a lot, but don't really know anything about it.

That said, here's the old drive and the new drive.

funkyass · Post by **funkyass** » Sat Jul 18, 2009 4:11 am

They'll fill up soon enough.

data is like a gas...

or more correctly, porn.

Post by **grinvader** » Sat Jul 18, 2009 6:48 am

You give them to me.

sweener2001 · Post by **sweener2001** » Sat Jul 18, 2009 7:39 am

if you have a wii, one of them can be used to load games. you'll just need an enclosure with usb 2.0. (assuming these already aren't external)

otherwise, yeah, they'll fill up pretty quick regardless.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Sat Jul 18, 2009 7:57 am

Do you need RAID or you couldn't just go directly to 1+TB?

PHoNyMiKe · Post by **PHoNyMiKe** » Sat Jul 18, 2009 2:02 pm

I use 2 500GB drives in raid mirror, have my operating systems and storage drive on it, so when 1 fails it can be replaced with no data loss.

DOLLS (J) [!] · Post by **DOLLS (J) [!]** » Sat Jul 18, 2009 8:13 pm

Stripe 'em.

DancemasterGlenn · Post by **DancemasterGlenn** » Sun Jul 19, 2009 4:41 am

PHoNyMiKe wrote:I use 2 500GB drives in raid mirror, have my operating systems and storage drive on it, so when 1 fails it can be replaced with no data loss.

How did you set this up? Was any of it OS specific?

funkyass · Post by **funkyass** » Sun Jul 19, 2009 5:44 am

RAID level 1 is simple mirroring.

PHoNyMiKe · Post by **PHoNyMiKe** » Mon Jul 20, 2009 8:45 pm

I think you can do it with ubuntu via software, my motherboard supports raid via hardware, though I've read software raid and cheap motherboard raid get about the same performance. I had them striped, and it was nice and fast, but one failed, and had to redo multiboot windows and shit. I wouldn't recommend putting your os on a stripe, maybe extra data drives on stripe if you do lots of video editing and large file stuff.

DancemasterGlenn · Post by **DancemasterGlenn** » Tue Jul 21, 2009 11:20 pm

Thanks, I'll definitely look into it when the new drive arrives.