"Yes" wrote in message
...
I'm curious. My builds usually have two hard drives (out of habit I
suppose) and one external HD for backup. Each HD is 500Gb; the
external HD (USB 2) is smaller. I prefer to keep data on a separate HD
from the O/S.
Like you my preferred is two hard drives. One for the OS, applications and
personal data and another for the paging file (and possibly database files).
Since for any new machine I'd spec it with sufficient RAM not to need a
paging file, then unless I'm doing heavy database work then a single drive
ought to be sufficient.
I prefer three external drives for backup. Three might seem a little
excessing but the rational is:
1 connected to my pc for backup.
2 stored off site.
my worst case scenario is a fire (destroying everything) when I've brought
my off-site backup disk in to swap it, hence the reason for having 2
off-site.
Personally, I don't intend to use cloud based storage for my files, but
are you all going that route?
No. I like to know where my files are and I want speedy access to them. But
I suppose for small backups that cloud based storage would be fine. I say
small, because if I were to backup my pc and try to copy that to a clound
storage provider then it wouldn't be practical considering the volume of
data.
For those who run their build as a virtual pc (I'm thinking about
making the switch), any thoughts about how many HDs to use and why?
I now have two servers in the office on which I run other virtual servers.
Typically I've gone for four drives - mirrored system disk and two data
disks which I use for various virtual pc/server images. None of the servers
I've virtualised are hitting the disk much, but I have gone for as much RAM
in the hosting server as possible. None of my virtual servers are
particularly disk intensive, I've given the virtual servers only the RAM I
think they need (upping this if necessary) and in this environment (YMMV)
for what I'm doing ensuring that the hosting server has ample RAM was more
important than worrying about numbers of drives. In my case 32GB or RAM,
more than that would require changing the motherboard.
Hope this helps.
--
Brian Cryer
http://www.cryer.co.uk/brian