Installing windows 7, have 2x1tb drives - Need help!!

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funkin182

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Hi guys, i posted a thread a while ago about putting a new hard drive in my computer to make recording more seamless. Im going to do a custom install of windows 7 and wipe everything. I have never used 2 harddrives in a computer - do i need to set up raid or anything? I am also unsure of what the best thing to do is when assigning my drives. Ideally id like to have windows etc on one and music on the other. On the windows drive id like to partition the drive so that one half is for a user account for work and another half of the drive for play. I dont have the money to set up another computer - let alone the space - so i think this is my best option if its possible. I have never partitioned a drive before and dont recall seeing an option for it when i installed w7 the first time so im not sure how to do that part. And i guess my only other qualm is whether i can have different user accounts on different partitions. Help is much appreciated ill be picking up the hdd tomorrow morning! Thanks
 
Raid

Don't bother setting up partitions.
If your motherboard supports RAID, then I would exploit it. But then you have to make the age old "performance over safety" decision.
RAID 0 makes both drives look like 1 big fast drive to the OS but, if one drive goes, then you lose the data on both drives. Drives today are fast enough, and I (personally) would go with RAID 1 which mirrors 1 drive to the other. If one fails, you replace the failed drive and the RAID will rebuild the array. The only down side is you have 2 -1TB drives, but get only 1TB of usable space.

Putting data on a separate drive is nice, but you would be wasting a LOT of space putting only the OS on a 1 TB drive! If your MB supports 4 drives in 2 RAID arrays, you could go get 2 small (probably can't find much smaller than 250 gig anymore) drives in RAID 1 for the OS, then use the 2 1TB drives in a separate RAID 1 for your data. That would give you max safety, and still keep your data segregated.
If not, you could still get the 2 smaller drives. Install the OS on one, then clone it and put it in your sock drawer for safe keeping. You would have to re-clone it after updates or major changes, but that's easy to run overnight.
Then use RAID 1 on your data drives.
I know it hurts to give up a TB, but I would go for the safety of RAID 1. Losing data SUCKS in any case, but it's infuriating and heartbreaking when you lose your own creations.
In either case make sure you place your swap drive on the OS drive.

If you have to stick with only the 2 1TB drives, than I would recommend RAID 1 and just install everything on it, and keep things segregated with a well thought out folder structure.

If your MB does not support RAID at all, you could always buy a third party RAID card.....
Use RAID
RAID good.
Also... make sure you backup to an external drive REGULARLY.

**Try HARD not to set up separate user accounts! It only causes undue hardship!
 
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Wow thanks for the reply!! My motherboard does not support raid and tbh i have never used it and didnt want to get involved haha. I have done some reading and there was a good soundonsound review that said raid didnt really effect the quality or recording. I think ill just set up like this: HD1 - Primary Master should be for programs/OS/etc. HD2 - Secondary Master for recording data(tracks and samples etc). I believe this is what most musos do
 
funkin182 said:
Wow thanks for the reply!! My motherboard does not support raid and tbh i have never used it and didnt want to get involved haha. I have done some reading and there was a good soundonsound review that said raid didnt really effect the quality or recording. I think ill just set up like this: HD1 - Primary Master should be for programs/OS/etc. HD2 - Secondary Master for recording data(tracks and samples etc). I believe this is what most musos do
Click to expand...

you are missing the most important reason to have two drives; backup. Hard drives fail. Its a fact and it happens regularly. So, I'd set up like you said, but I'd then backup your music files back to drive one. You can make a partition or not doesn't matter. I use FBackup on my Win7 machine. It backs up my stuff at night while I'm sleeping. http://www.fbackup.com/
 
Yeah ill just back everything up externally. I still like the idea of having separate user accounts because then i can have one with everything stripped back to the bare essentials and then have another account thats just normal. As i said i would rather have 2 different computers but thats just not an option. At least this way when i want to record i can just log on to the another account which doesnt start up things like firewall and antivirus and is not connected to the internet.I would like to have the two accounts on separate partitions so i can have my recording account with all the daw programs etc sitting on the more efficient part of the disk. Does anyone know if this is possible?
 
I know my post might have been more than you were looking for, but hey, you have to be informed before you can pick and choose what works for you.

RAID has nothing to do with sound quality. As Jeff D says you MUST concern yourself immediately with getting a good backup plan. I haven't tried FBackup yet, but it looks great. Try it.

Again, if you use a terabyte drive for the OS and programs only, you are wasting an incredible amount of space. (Maybe you could use all that space for a SECOND backup? hah? nice...)

PS.... Just in case it needs to be said, ALWAYS backup to a different drive than the data is on..... (I promised myself I wouldn't say "duh!")

An external HD is best, especially if the entire computer goes <poof>
*DON'T NEGLECT OR PUT OFF BACKING UP!!

I am an IT guy, and I have an office full of failed hard drives. ( * to self * "I should throw these out.")
 
lol it wouldnt really be backing up if you just copied the files on the same drive ey... Thanks for the post man it really was helpful. The first drive wont be wasted ive got like 40gigs of music (as in not my projects) and probably about 500gigs of movies and tv shows etc that ill archive on that first drive.
 
RoadKingRick said:
I am an IT guy, and I have an office full of failed hard drives. ( * to self * "I should throw these out.")
Click to expand...

Rip them apart and use the platters as coasters.

Anyway I bought one of these and it works great for back ups and archiving if you're running a home network. http://www.dlink.ca/products/?pid=509

Set it up as RAID 1 and if one drive fails you just snap in a new one. The nice thing is it runs on it's own, no need to have another computer running.
 
That looks like a pretty sweet enclosure but once again i just dont have the money for more toys. Im happy to manually backup my data on the external i own. I like the idea of tinyxp.. but have never set up a dual boot system before. This way i could have xp on one hdd and w7 on the other. The stripped back xp would be for all my music software and w7 for everything else like office, internet and games. Can anyone comment on the stability of tiny xp? I have used cracked operating systems before and never ran into major troubles. I guess im just unsure of how to do the dual boot thingy
 
RoadKingRick said:
Don't bother setting up partitions.
If your motherboard supports RAID, then I would exploit it.
Click to expand...

I was going to use on-board raid for my file server but after hours and hours of research it's not worth it. Obviously he'd be using RAID 0 or 1, where I wanted to use RAID 5 on 4 1.5TB drives. Regardless, after I spent every spare minute for weeks researching on-board raid and actually implementing it on a lab machine, I decided to forget the whole thing. Unless you buy a real RAID card that uses a dedicated controller on the card, the gains are minimal or it's actually slower. Like I said, I was using raid 5 but it took 72 hours to build the RAID array and if it decided to bomb out one day, you can't mount the drives elsewhere to get your data back. RAID is never a substitute for an external backup even if you're mirroring the drive (I know, he mentioned he was using an external drive.) Mirroring just allows you to keep using the machine if a drive fails. Stripping is even worse because if a drive fails or the software has issues, you array is gone. RAID 5 isn't technically a mirror and stripe but it has the same issues.

If you buy a really expensive card like a DELL PERC that comes in servers, you should be cool. On the other hand, you might as well buy a SSD drive instead.

I'm not trying to be a know-it-all, I was just so disappointed in my findings that I wanted to share.

Nic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
 
Raid

I couldn't agree more about RAID 0, I get nervous for the gamers I see blissfully using it.
Keeping the machine going if a drive fails with RAID 1 until you replace it is kinda the whole idea....
No one will argue that higher end cards are better.. I have RAID 5 in all my servers and they function very well. Rebuilding a failed drive is slow, but it does eliminate down time.
I don't know why and am sorry about all of the issues you had with RAID. It never been that much of a hassle on all of the installs I've done, but I know it just takes one particularly snarky experience to turn someone off to something! But that being said, I wouldn't be without it given the choice. ( * he says as he types this on a box with no RAID....)

But enough of this discussion here. We should be talking about Home Recording (look! up there at the url!)

(This is supposed to be a happy occasion! Let's not argue and bicker about who killed who!)
 
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I think 99% of the users on this forum would be better off just using one drive internally, and setting up the second drive externally in a USB or ESATA case. Then use a program like Ghost and write a backup of the internal drive to the external drive every month or so. Just my opinion...
 
one very important thing to remember here is that normal consumer "onboard" RAID are host based which is little more than software RAID, the hard drive controller will use your system RAM and CPU for all the RAID processing. A proper RAID controller will have it's own memory and processor for these tasks so there is no hit on system resources but those cards very often cost more than a consumer level PC. So do you really want a marginal increase in HD through-put at the cost of memory and CPU?
 
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