How many hard drives (and size) do you place in your build these days?

On 10/22/2012 8:57 AM, Yes wrote:
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.

Personally, I don't intend to use cloud based storage for my files, but
are you all going that route?

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?

Thanks,
John

I use a single spinning drive of either 2 or 3tB and a single SSD of at
least 120gB. If the OS and chipset supports it (Intel Z68 for example) I
use the SSD as cache for the HD, otherwise I use the SSD as the system
drive and reserve the spinning drive for data storage.

To my mind, external drives don't really enter into the 'build' equation. I
have (probably) 6 external drives right now ranging from 400gB up to 2tB.
Since I don't trust any backup which isn't in a protected location such as
my bank's vault I use multiple layers of backup and rotate things in and
out as required as often as I can remember to do it. Otherwise all of the
machines in the house are backed up nightly to a local 12tB server -- I am
my own cloud.

"Yes" wrote in message
...
Paul wrote:

Yes wrote:


Thanks. A virtual pc has started piqueing my interest but never had
seen any user feedback about how much RAM or how many HDs were
useful for it. It looks like I might only need to up my RAM in
order to have at least the basics for a virtual machine. Still not
sure I'll do that because of how I'd want to configure the s/w
side, but that's a different issue :-)


I've thought about a virtual pc for the reasons you cite - O/S and
malware. The questions I saw for me a
1. to what extent would I need to change my hardware
2. what s/w would I need in order to switch
3. cost to do so

As far as the hardware goes, Brian Cryer's response and yours (thank
you both) suggest that my existing build could handle a vm with little
to no additional h/w, though maybe adding more RAM may make sense for
me. My pc has 4Gb RAM at present - that's OK for my existing O/S (Win
XP Pro, SP3), but eventually I would like to go to a 64 bit O/S.

With regard to the s/w, that's beyond the usual focus of
alt.comp.hardware, though I'd be happy to hear comments. My pocketbook
is the biggest constraint :-)

Ideally, I'd like to move to a 64-bit O/S and run everything in a VM
environment I want to keep the commercial software I have. The
programs were developed to work in Windows XP (and earlier). They
satisfy my needs and replacing them is too costly. So, I'm thinking at
least one VM centered around WinXP. From there, there are other O/S's
I've thought about playing around with, which is why VM is so appealing.

John

You have plenty of ram to try things out and see if you want to proceed.
Download/install virtual box (slight learning curve) and download/install
the release preview of Windows 8 (the horror, the horror, to quote Marlon
Brando). For the VM's memory, 512 megs or 1 gig should give you adequate
performance. You can also try out ubuntu or pc linux -- or anything, for
that matter: one nice feature is that you can run anything in the VM for
free, at least till the activation fail kicks in. As to hard drive space,
each VM tends to take up 4-8 gigabytes. (That's tends. Not will or must
for any contentious speed readers zooming by). VMs grow with time, because
deleting stuff does not remove the space it took up in the file, but you can
zero out the space then compact them.

As far as security goes, a fairly brief review gave me the impression that
you can isolate Virtual Box more completely from the host than Virtual PC.
And again, my impression is that V. Box will run more different OSs as
guests than V. PC. And with each it is fairly simple to give them access to
your network card, so you can get to the internet.

Either one of them is fairly straightforward, and you could start running a
VM tonight.

Glaasgok wrote:
"Yes" wrote in message
...
Paul wrote:

Yes wrote:

Thanks. A virtual pc has started piqueing my interest but never had
seen any user feedback about how much RAM or how many HDs were
useful for it. It looks like I might only need to up my RAM in
order to have at least the basics for a virtual machine. Still not
sure I'll do that because of how I'd want to configure the s/w
side, but that's a different issue :-)
I've thought about a virtual pc for the reasons you cite - O/S and
malware. The questions I saw for me a
1. to what extent would I need to change my hardware
2. what s/w would I need in order to switch
3. cost to do so

As far as the hardware goes, Brian Cryer's response and yours (thank
you both) suggest that my existing build could handle a vm with little
to no additional h/w, though maybe adding more RAM may make sense for
me. My pc has 4Gb RAM at present - that's OK for my existing O/S (Win
XP Pro, SP3), but eventually I would like to go to a 64 bit O/S.

With regard to the s/w, that's beyond the usual focus of
alt.comp.hardware, though I'd be happy to hear comments. My pocketbook
is the biggest constraint :-)

Ideally, I'd like to move to a 64-bit O/S and run everything in a VM
environment I want to keep the commercial software I have. The
programs were developed to work in Windows XP (and earlier). They
satisfy my needs and replacing them is too costly. So, I'm thinking at
least one VM centered around WinXP. From there, there are other O/S's
I've thought about playing around with, which is why VM is so appealing.

John

You have plenty of ram to try things out and see if you want to proceed.
Download/install virtual box (slight learning curve) and download/install
the release preview of Windows 8 (the horror, the horror, to quote Marlon
Brando). For the VM's memory, 512 megs or 1 gig should give you adequate
performance. You can also try out ubuntu or pc linux -- or anything, for
that matter: one nice feature is that you can run anything in the VM for
free, at least till the activation fail kicks in. As to hard drive space,
each VM tends to take up 4-8 gigabytes. (That's tends. Not will or must
for any contentious speed readers zooming by). VMs grow with time, because
deleting stuff does not remove the space it took up in the file, but you can
zero out the space then compact them.

As far as security goes, a fairly brief review gave me the impression that
you can isolate Virtual Box more completely from the host than Virtual PC.
And again, my impression is that V. Box will run more different OSs as
guests than V. PC. And with each it is fairly simple to give them access to
your network card, so you can get to the internet.

Either one of them is fairly straightforward, and you could start running a
VM tonight.

I'm curious. Have you tried Win2K on VirtualBox ? What did you think ?

On my machine, VirtualBox running a Win2K guest, used all the CPU
on the cores enabled, with Win2K sitting idle in the desktop.

VPC2007 has never done that. VPC2007 stinks for other reasons, but
pegging the CPU isn't one of them. For example, to install Ubuntu in
VPC2007, takes plenty of little workarounds, and the multimedia
support that results, isn't very good (anything with PulseAudio
won't work right). But right now, the pegging of the CPU on VirtualBox,
leaves me a little bit less enthusiastic about VirtualBox. Especially
as the boneheads at VirtualBox have known about that bug for years
(tried to fix it, and didn't).

Paul

"Paul" wrote in message
...
Glaasgok wrote:
"Yes" wrote in message
...
Paul wrote:

Yes wrote:

Thanks. A virtual pc has started piqueing my interest but never had
seen any user feedback about how much RAM or how many HDs were
useful for it. It looks like I might only need to up my RAM in
order to have at least the basics for a virtual machine. Still not
sure I'll do that because of how I'd want to configure the s/w
side, but that's a different issue :-)
I've thought about a virtual pc for the reasons you cite - O/S and
malware. The questions I saw for me a
1. to what extent would I need to change my hardware
2. what s/w would I need in order to switch
3. cost to do so

As far as the hardware goes, Brian Cryer's response and yours (thank
you both) suggest that my existing build could handle a vm with little
to no additional h/w, though maybe adding more RAM may make sense for
me. My pc has 4Gb RAM at present - that's OK for my existing O/S (Win
XP Pro, SP3), but eventually I would like to go to a 64 bit O/S.

With regard to the s/w, that's beyond the usual focus of
alt.comp.hardware, though I'd be happy to hear comments. My pocketbook
is the biggest constraint :-)

Ideally, I'd like to move to a 64-bit O/S and run everything in a VM
environment I want to keep the commercial software I have. The
programs were developed to work in Windows XP (and earlier). They
satisfy my needs and replacing them is too costly. So, I'm thinking at
least one VM centered around WinXP. From there, there are other O/S's
I've thought about playing around with, which is why VM is so appealing.

John

You have plenty of ram to try things out and see if you want to proceed.
Download/install virtual box (slight learning curve) and download/install
the release preview of Windows 8 (the horror, the horror, to quote Marlon
Brando). For the VM's memory, 512 megs or 1 gig should give you adequate
performance. You can also try out ubuntu or pc linux -- or anything, for
that matter: one nice feature is that you can run anything in the VM for
free, at least till the activation fail kicks in. As to hard drive
space, each VM tends to take up 4-8 gigabytes. (That's tends. Not will
or must for any contentious speed readers zooming by). VMs grow with
time, because deleting stuff does not remove the space it took up in the
file, but you can zero out the space then compact them.

As far as security goes, a fairly brief review gave me the impression
that you can isolate Virtual Box more completely from the host than
Virtual PC. And again, my impression is that V. Box will run more
different OSs as guests than V. PC. And with each it is fairly simple to
give them access to your network card, so you can get to the internet.

Either one of them is fairly straightforward, and you could start running
a VM tonight.

I'm curious. Have you tried Win2K on VirtualBox ? What did you think ?

On my machine, VirtualBox running a Win2K guest, used all the CPU
on the cores enabled, with Win2K sitting idle in the desktop.

No, I haven't. I use it on XP to run an XP guest, and occasionally to test
installed versions of live rescue linux CDs. And on Windows 7 to run a Win
8 and Server 08 guests. I was using VPC 2007 and switched because, on a
laptop with 1.5 gigs RAM and a 1.6 GHz dual core processor, it ran an XP
guest faster than VPC. I use it to look at stuff and to test things I have
worries about.

It seems weird that they would fail to fix such a serious and known bug for
so long. I guess they work on the standard PC industry theory of attrition:
if we ignore the bug long enough, no one will use the troublesome software
any more and then the complaints will stop. ;(

Could your problem be specific to that particular system? A quick search
yeielded this (from a guy with a James Bond villain name):

"Bakon Jarser
September 10th, 2008, 01:41 AM
snip
Never heard that before. I run win2k just fine in virtualbox."

The only other thing that comes to mind is that something went awry with the
installation of the guest additions. But you have probably uninstalled and
reinstalled everything.




VPC2007 has never done that. VPC2007 stinks for other reasons, but
pegging the CPU isn't one of them. For example, to install Ubuntu in
VPC2007, takes plenty of little workarounds, and the multimedia
support that results, isn't very good (anything with PulseAudio
won't work right). But right now, the pegging of the CPU on VirtualBox,
leaves me a little bit less enthusiastic about VirtualBox. Especially
as the boneheads at VirtualBox have known about that bug for years
(tried to fix it, and didn't).

Paul

Glaasgok wrote:
"Paul" wrote in message
...
Glaasgok wrote:
"Yes" wrote in message
...
Paul wrote:

Yes wrote:

Thanks. A virtual pc has started piqueing my interest but never had
seen any user feedback about how much RAM or how many HDs were
useful for it. It looks like I might only need to up my RAM in
order to have at least the basics for a virtual machine. Still not
sure I'll do that because of how I'd want to configure the s/w
side, but that's a different issue :-)
I've thought about a virtual pc for the reasons you cite - O/S and
malware. The questions I saw for me a
1. to what extent would I need to change my hardware
2. what s/w would I need in order to switch
3. cost to do so

As far as the hardware goes, Brian Cryer's response and yours (thank
you both) suggest that my existing build could handle a vm with little
to no additional h/w, though maybe adding more RAM may make sense for
me. My pc has 4Gb RAM at present - that's OK for my existing O/S (Win
XP Pro, SP3), but eventually I would like to go to a 64 bit O/S.

With regard to the s/w, that's beyond the usual focus of
alt.comp.hardware, though I'd be happy to hear comments. My pocketbook
is the biggest constraint :-)

Ideally, I'd like to move to a 64-bit O/S and run everything in a VM
environment I want to keep the commercial software I have. The
programs were developed to work in Windows XP (and earlier). They
satisfy my needs and replacing them is too costly. So, I'm thinking at
least one VM centered around WinXP. From there, there are other O/S's
I've thought about playing around with, which is why VM is so appealing.

John
You have plenty of ram to try things out and see if you want to proceed.
Download/install virtual box (slight learning curve) and download/install
the release preview of Windows 8 (the horror, the horror, to quote Marlon
Brando). For the VM's memory, 512 megs or 1 gig should give you adequate
performance. You can also try out ubuntu or pc linux -- or anything, for
that matter: one nice feature is that you can run anything in the VM for
free, at least till the activation fail kicks in. As to hard drive
space, each VM tends to take up 4-8 gigabytes. (That's tends. Not will
or must for any contentious speed readers zooming by). VMs grow with
time, because deleting stuff does not remove the space it took up in the
file, but you can zero out the space then compact them.

As far as security goes, a fairly brief review gave me the impression
that you can isolate Virtual Box more completely from the host than
Virtual PC. And again, my impression is that V. Box will run more
different OSs as guests than V. PC. And with each it is fairly simple to
give them access to your network card, so you can get to the internet.

Either one of them is fairly straightforward, and you could start running
a VM tonight.
I'm curious. Have you tried Win2K on VirtualBox ? What did you think ?

On my machine, VirtualBox running a Win2K guest, used all the CPU
on the cores enabled, with Win2K sitting idle in the desktop.

No, I haven't. I use it on XP to run an XP guest, and occasionally to test
installed versions of live rescue linux CDs. And on Windows 7 to run a Win
8 and Server 08 guests. I was using VPC 2007 and switched because, on a
laptop with 1.5 gigs RAM and a 1.6 GHz dual core processor, it ran an XP
guest faster than VPC. I use it to look at stuff and to test things I have
worries about.

It seems weird that they would fail to fix such a serious and known bug for
so long. I guess they work on the standard PC industry theory of attrition:
if we ignore the bug long enough, no one will use the troublesome software
any more and then the complaints will stop. ;(

Could your problem be specific to that particular system? A quick search
yeielded this (from a guy with a James Bond villain name):

"Bakon Jarser
September 10th, 2008, 01:41 AM
snip
Never heard that before. I run win2k just fine in virtualbox."

The only other thing that comes to mind is that something went awry with the
installation of the guest additions. But you have probably uninstalled and
reinstalled everything.

Actually, Guest Additions is part of the fun. It works slightly better
without Guest Additions. If you install Guest Additions, it's more
likely to peg the CPU and stay pegged. It has something to do with
task scheduling on the host, but knowing that doesn't help matters.

If I were to do anything at this point, I'd probably want to install
the host OS again. But I've done that twice already, and that's
wearing a little thin as well. The sun is shining outside, and
somehow, that looks more inviting right now.

Paul

Paul writes:

I'm curious. Have you tried Win2K on VirtualBox ? What did you think ?

I've never used Win2K in VirtualBox, but I remember there was a problem
way back that any one virtual machine would peg the CPU(s) even when
idle. The workaround was to start another, even empty one with no
actual OS to boot.

Anyways, that was years ago. I guess the issue here is idle detection
not working for Win2K for some reason. Worth looking for solutions on
VirtualBox forums though. Fiddling with different HALs may help.

"Paul" wrote in message
...
Glaasgok wrote:
"Paul" wrote in message
...
Glaasgok wrote:
"Yes" wrote in message
...
Paul wrote:

Yes wrote:

Thanks. A virtual pc has started piqueing my interest but never had
seen any user feedback about how much RAM or how many HDs were
useful for it. It looks like I might only need to up my RAM in
order to have at least the basics for a virtual machine. Still not
sure I'll do that because of how I'd want to configure the s/w
side, but that's a different issue :-)
I've thought about a virtual pc for the reasons you cite - O/S and
malware. The questions I saw for me a
1. to what extent would I need to change my hardware
2. what s/w would I need in order to switch
3. cost to do so

As far as the hardware goes, Brian Cryer's response and yours (thank
you both) suggest that my existing build could handle a vm with little
to no additional h/w, though maybe adding more RAM may make sense for
me. My pc has 4Gb RAM at present - that's OK for my existing O/S (Win
XP Pro, SP3), but eventually I would like to go to a 64 bit O/S.

With regard to the s/w, that's beyond the usual focus of
alt.comp.hardware, though I'd be happy to hear comments. My
pocketbook
is the biggest constraint :-)

Ideally, I'd like to move to a 64-bit O/S and run everything in a VM
environment I want to keep the commercial software I have. The
programs were developed to work in Windows XP (and earlier). They
satisfy my needs and replacing them is too costly. So, I'm thinking
at
least one VM centered around WinXP. From there, there are other O/S's
I've thought about playing around with, which is why VM is so
appealing.

John
You have plenty of ram to try things out and see if you want to
proceed.
Download/install virtual box (slight learning curve) and
download/install the release preview of Windows 8 (the horror, the
horror, to quote Marlon Brando). For the VM's memory, 512 megs or 1
gig should give you adequate performance. You can also try out ubuntu
or pc linux -- or anything, for that matter: one nice feature is that
you can run anything in the VM for free, at least till the activation
fail kicks in. As to hard drive space, each VM tends to take up 4-8
gigabytes. (That's tends. Not will or must for any contentious speed
readers zooming by). VMs grow with time, because deleting stuff does
not remove the space it took up in the file, but you can zero out the
space then compact them.

As far as security goes, a fairly brief review gave me the impression
that you can isolate Virtual Box more completely from the host than
Virtual PC. And again, my impression is that V. Box will run more
different OSs as guests than V. PC. And with each it is fairly simple
to give them access to your network card, so you can get to the
internet.

Either one of them is fairly straightforward, and you could start
running a VM tonight.
I'm curious. Have you tried Win2K on VirtualBox ? What did you think ?

On my machine, VirtualBox running a Win2K guest, used all the CPU
on the cores enabled, with Win2K sitting idle in the desktop.

No, I haven't. I use it on XP to run an XP guest, and occasionally to
test installed versions of live rescue linux CDs. And on Windows 7 to
run a Win 8 and Server 08 guests. I was using VPC 2007 and switched
because, on a laptop with 1.5 gigs RAM and a 1.6 GHz dual core processor,
it ran an XP guest faster than VPC. I use it to look at stuff and to
test things I have worries about.

It seems weird that they would fail to fix such a serious and known bug
for so long. I guess they work on the standard PC industry theory of
attrition: if we ignore the bug long enough, no one will use the
troublesome software any more and then the complaints will stop. ;(

Could your problem be specific to that particular system? A quick search
yeielded this (from a guy with a James Bond villain name):

"Bakon Jarser
September 10th, 2008, 01:41 AM
snip
Never heard that before. I run win2k just fine in virtualbox."

The only other thing that comes to mind is that something went awry with
the installation of the guest additions. But you have probably
uninstalled and reinstalled everything.

Actually, Guest Additions is part of the fun. It works slightly better
without Guest Additions. If you install Guest Additions, it's more
likely to peg the CPU and stay pegged. It has something to do with
task scheduling on the host, but knowing that doesn't help matters.

If I were to do anything at this point, I'd probably want to install
the host OS again. But I've done that twice already, and that's
wearing a little thin as well. The sun is shining outside, and
somehow, that looks more inviting right now.

Paul

Well, we're having a tropical non-storm, more like a windy drizzle amid many
TV tropical storm warnings and a day off from school for kids.

Your problem seems to have something to do with your host machine's specs or
perhaps changes made from the virtual machine's default configuration. I
found some 13 year old CDs and tried to install it on VBox. Failed. Tried
installing on VPC 2007. Failed. Realized that the problem had to do with
mis-alignment between the heads on the drive that made the CDs and the drive
on the current machine. Installed from another CD into VPC then attached
the VHD to V-Box. Worked a charm, 292 M. memory setting, 4 G. vhd size.
Runs, surfs the web, etc. The VM and the virtual hard drive are on an
external, USB hard drive.

CPU utilization on host machine very low. Memory usage on host also low,
between 75-100 megs.

This is on an old toshiba laptop, 1.6ghz dual core proc., 1.5 gigs of RAM.
The VM is fast, it's nice, it's win2k, microsoft's one true big win.
Twinges of nostalgia.

The only thing not tested was installation into V-box using the working CD
and Box's native vdi format.

Joel wrote:

"Brian Cryer" wrote:

snip
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.

I do DVD authoring and graphic retouching (I am Photoshop user) so I
have my couple years old system upto 16GB of RAM.

Man, I remember I had to save $$$$$ by ordering 1MB of DRAM for
$2,000 ($US) from Hong Kong which was couple hundred bucks cheaper
than buying in US (that time). And 1MB of DRAM for the External
Memory Card not internal (now I don't rember if it was Expanded or
Extended Memory Card, and it was way back to 70's).

grin - I remember the early 80s. Something like $250 for a 10Mb HD,
IIRC. :-)

Joel wrote:


Well, for decades I have been working on video and photography those
use lot of disk space, so I have upgraded my couple years old system
to (3) 1TB SATA, and (1) 500GB EIDE as drive C: for Windows only.

I have around 4-5 500GB external hard drives, (2) 1TB external hard
drive and (1) 1.5TB external.

WHY? because I have been using computer for almost 4 decades, the
price is dirt cheap these days comparing to what I paid for much
smaller hard drive (can you image 2MB hard drive onsale cost around 2
grands. YES 2-MEGA). I use lot of space and too lazy to burn to DVD
too often (I sometime transfer 40-80+GB to DVDs a day).

My mind boggles at the amount of data you've accumulated over the
years. I've been using computers since the late 70s, but my activities
don't even come close to generating the volume of data you describe.
The external HD was more to provide backup of what I considered
essential files I needed to save if catastrophe struck my pc; I could
carry it to safety with me in a worst case scenario :-)

The biggest problem for me is simply those old games that ran on cough,
cough floppy drives under an O/S that are now obscure or obsolete -
e.g., Amiga and O/S 2 I've kept the media and sure would like to
re-play one or two of them, but that's probably just wishful thinking
these days until some place like gog.com (Good Old Games) gets the
rights to
convert them to run on current equipment :-(

John

On 06/11/12 03:36, Yes wrote:
Joel wrote:


Well, for decades I have been working on video and photography those
use lot of disk space, so I have upgraded my couple years old system
to (3) 1TB SATA, and (1) 500GB EIDE as drive C: for Windows only.

I have around 4-5 500GB external hard drives, (2) 1TB external hard
drive and (1) 1.5TB external.

WHY? because I have been using computer for almost 4 decades, the
price is dirt cheap these days comparing to what I paid for much
smaller hard drive (can you image 2MB hard drive onsale cost around 2
grands. YES 2-MEGA). I use lot of space and too lazy to burn to DVD
too often (I sometime transfer 40-80+GB to DVDs a day).

My mind boggles at the amount of data you've accumulated over the
years. I've been using computers since the late 70s, but my activities
don't even come close to generating the volume of data you describe.

Yep, old software was compact. A few floppies. Now a basic game comes on
a DVD, or two.