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Building a new computer has given me another opportunity to reevaluate how I arrange files on my various hard drives. Significant changes to my system this time around include my decision to give up RAID and my inclusion of a 60 GB solid state drive. The challenge is to decide how to manage my various needs for performance, storage, and backup.

Bidding Farewell to RAID

After working with with both RAID 0 and 1 since building Tess in 2005, I’ve decided that it really isn’t worth it unless you’re willing to advance to higher levels that include a parity drive. Originally, I had one RAID 0 array for everything, hoping that spanning my data across two drives would boost performance. Unfortunately, any performance gains were overshadowed by the hassle installing an operating system on the array. The increased failure rate definitely held true in my case, causing me to experience firsthand how difficult it is to attempt to recover data or an OS when it’s been spanned across two drives. Even when the drives aren’t completely failing, hiccups or crashes were sometimes enough to perturb the system and require rebuilding of the array – especially tricky if your OS is on it.

I eventually moved to a single drive for the operating system and a RAID 1 array for my personal data. While this kind of setup gives you a “life” with respect to drive failure, it’s not actually as helpful as a good backup system. Any changes you make to files are written to both drives, whereas if you have a regular backup system and accidentally destroy something or corrupt it in a crash, you’re only set back as far as your last backup.

Working in the SSD

Today’s solid-state drives are essentially big versions of the flash drive you carry around in your backpack. With no moving parts, they’re able to read and write files significantly faster than their traditional counterparts. They do, however, have a limited number of writes, so it is ideal to use the drive for activities that are primarily read-only. Using an SSD for an operating system and programs can significantly reduce the time it takes for your computer to boot, shut down, or launch applications.

A large chunk my SSD’s storage space  is taken up by Windows 7. Most programs and utilities don’t take up that much space, so I’ve been installing them on there as well. In order to minimize writing to the SSD, I’m continuing to keep my personal data on large traditional hard drives.

Final Setup

The configuration for Summer I’m currently working with puts Windows 7 x64 and most of my programs on the 60 GB SSD. I’m not doing any additional tweaks for that drive as Windows 7 appears to be pretty well optimized for SSDs already. I’ve set aside a 320 GB HDD for games and application packages, like the Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office, all of which tend to require multiple gigabytes of space. I’m using a quick registry hack to move my users folder, including application data, to a third 500 GB drive, so all of that will remain separate and accessible even if the OS fails or needs to be reinstalled (It’s lovely having Firefox remember your open tabs after a building a whole new computer). Finally, media is going on either Summer’s 1 TB drive or Zoe’s 2 TB in the other room.

For backup, I plan on using a second 500 GB drive to do incremental backups of the user data, while storing images of the OS drive on either the 1 TB or an external. I hope to be able to use Windows 7’s built-in tools to accomplish this on a regular basis. Like the routers, this is a bit of an ongoing process, but I’m reasonably confident that this is my best iteration to date.