Back up drive?

[FloOFy]

Hey, I'm planning on getting a new Seagate 500gb (32mb cache) hardrive[/url] to replace my existing 250gb (8mb cache) hardrive. After I clone all of my data from my old drive what do I do with it? I've been thinking about using it as a backup drive in case if my new drive fails. But I'm not sure how to do that...

Do I put the drives in RAID 1 or do I do something in Windows? And would having an the same OS on both drives affect anything?

Or should I just leave the drive out of the case in case if the new drive fails?

 

[wahnula]

Forget RAID, as you need two drives of identical size for most useful implementation in RAID arrays. Yes, you can use it for backup, simply install it in your case as a master or slave depending on your configuration, format it and go.

With the price of drives today it might be worth it to just keep it as-is and buy a second 500GB drive (or bigger) for RAID 1 or backup. Use the 250 GB as "point-in-time" backup of your life. I NEVER throw out or format old drives...I simply put them in a box in the closet. You never know when/if you'll need that on file or data folder.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[burtsbees]

I would actually get an external drive for backup, like a USB/firewire drive. Of course, USB2 is faster...
I have at least 3 backups of all my data, and two good ghost images (Norton). I backed up my data to an external hard drive, an external storage array (no JBOD, all individual disks), and Blu-Ray disks.

Burt

 

[BadBigBen]

Hey, it's almost Christmas, so the following should be taken lightly...

After I clone all of my data from my old drive what do I do with it?

Go to the lake, if it is frozen over, put on your skates and use it as a pug to play hockey...

or use it as a door stopper, hmmm, you could also take it apart and use the platters as fancy coasters for the next party, they look fantastic...

there are literally 1000+ ways to use an old drive, but the best suggestion have been already given by Tony...



Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."