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Old August 4th 09, 03:37 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Dave[_35_]
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Default Building a box for a Net drive


"Jess Fertudei" wrote in message
...
So I've been thinking about building a box for a net drive at home for
photography and graphic art storage and such. I have an ASUS A7V600X-E
board here and a 2400 Athlon and three 256M sticks of various PC2100 and
2700 RAM. I was going to put Windows 2000 Pro on an IDE 8.4G or 10G drive
and put two 640G WD Blue or two 750G WD Green drives on the two SATA
ports.

Originally I was going to RAID them (even though I've never done that) and
map them as a net drive on two of the XP Home machines here (never done
that either). I read a review on the Green drives that suggests they don't
like RAID and the constant running shortens the life span and makes extra
heat (and noise to cool them). So I was thinking that I have a copy of
Acronis True Image 9.0 here that's not doing anything and wondered if I
could just map one of the drives and somehow tell Acronis to keep them
mirrored incrementally every day thereby keeping a safe copy and yet
working them less and getting another 110Gigs for the same money.

Is that a better option?

Anything else I need to think about?


I'm not sure, but I think you'll have to upgrade your acronis software. I
know I had an earlier version of acronis (9, I believe) that wouldn't play
nicely with SATA drives. I've got version 11 of Acronis now, no problems
with it and SATA drives.

It's your build, and I haven't priced hard drives recently, but to keep it
simple, I'd probably get an IDE drive of about 500G or so, then buy the
largest SATA drive I could find. Create two partitions on the IDE drive,
one 10GB, and the other using all the remaining space. Put your OS on the
IDE drive on the small partition (of course). Then create two partitions
on the SATA drive. One small partition, say 10Gigs. Use Acronis to backup
drive C: to that small partition on the SATA drive periodically. Do this
backup manually, whenever you think about it. (not as critical to do
automatic backups of this) Then set acronis to backup the OTHER partition
on the SATA drive automatically, to the large partition of the IDE drive.
That's how I'd handle it. -Dave