Re: Adding drives to my Media Server

[Simon Ryley <simon.ryley@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul

Thanks for the info, I think the way to go is to make a spanned volume
so I end up with a 320Gb volume.   Is there any way to force the OS to
put some files on a particular drive? It would be nice to guarantee that
the Ghost of my windows install is definitely on a different physical
drive...

Everything important on the pictures and music front is already backed
up and stored elsewhere.  You only make that mistake once...

Simon

Paul Gordon wrote:

> Doh! - just reread your question and saw the point re the onboard
RAID...
>
> A couple of other things to note...
>
> If you configure the 2 drives into a single RAID volume in hardware,
> it will very highly likely be destructive to all the data on both
> drives.... - you currently have your XP install on this drive... - do
> you want to retain that, or are you happy to reformat &
rebuild?...
> RAID controllers are pretty much ignorant of partitions, and only
> see/care about/talk to physical disks as a single unit for the
> purposes of building a RAID set...
>
> Also, is your 80GB drive already partioned into more than 1, or is it
> a single big 80GB partition? - you're likely to need/want to split it
> into two for some of the options that are available to you.... so you
> may need to get in there with partition magic or its ilk to tinker
> with the partitioning.... - unless of course you're happy to reformat
> it to achieve this, thus losing all your existing data... (did I say
> backup??)
>
> Another thing you might want to consider, as an extension of my backup
> suggestion in my previous reply, is using image backups to save your
> C:\ drive as well. (Norton Ghost or PQI ImageCenter spring to mind,
> but there are others). I have always found it absolutely invaluable to
> always have an image of the system drive stored on a seperate physical
> disk on every PC I have ever built... - absolutely brilliant for rapid
> recovery from almost anything that can go wrong with it!
>
> Paul G.
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx on behalf of Simon Ryley
> Sent: Thu 19/01/2006 13:08
> To: UKHA_D Group
> Subject: [ukha_d] Adding drives to my Media Server
>
>
>
> The time has come when the little 80Gb hard disc in my media server
> isn't big enough to store all the pictures, mp3s and freeview
recordings
> we now have.  So I'm looking to upgrade..
>
> Current spec is a Spinpoint SATA 80Gb, holding windows xp, a few gig
of
> photos, 10g of mp3s and the rest as freeview recordings.
>
> For performance reasons, I'd like to put the recordings on a separate
> drive, probably a 250Gb Spinpoint SATA.  This leaves me with an 80Gb
> drive that will be barely used.  Is there any way in windows or
> otherwise to combine the two drives to one big virtual drive, giving
me
> about 60Gb of extra recording space, and hopefully improving the data
> throughput as I am using both Sata channels in parallel?  The
> motherboard does support Raid, but I've not been down that route
before.
>
> Is this a sensible option, and if not, does anyone have a small
> Spinpoint sata drive they no longer want?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Simon
>
>
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>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
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