Huge Hard Drives (again)

[ahhaa]

OK, I managed to get the WD 250 into a USB case, and get both found by windews; but then in there's these options for formatting- Primary Partition, Extended Partition, Logical Drives.

I'm clear in a fuzzy way about the differences, but am not sure why I'd pick what... and Vista doesn't seem to be clear at all about the sizes- both partitions are reported as the full size of the drive.

When you have storage the size of a small black hole, how do you plan it?

[Bjs]

Depends on how you want and need to organise data

If you can deal with storing data to a single mass partition , then go with single primary

If you think you would need access to a seconday partition (extended) , then create the first , choose size of required partition , create , then format ... you then go through the same motions to generate the secondary (extended) partition .

You can create as many partitions as you like ... 22 are definable, each partition will be assigned a drive letter , (A/B reserved , C/D in common use) .

[Krispy Kritter]

250GB is an average drive size. If you want a black hole, there are 1TB drives now available.

[zoobie]

That's incredible...

[ahhaa]

yeah, the new drives are based on quantum effects; the guy who came up with it just got a Nobel Prize. Its the first realworld part of the coming quantum computers.

OK I get your advice, but it doesn't explain why you'd create all those partitions. Does it have to do with AV scanning & backup strategy?

I just formatted one 120 G partition- about 3 hours over USB 2. Quick format took about 5 minutes... and then there's cluster sizes... hmmm.

[redwudz]

I rarely use multiple partitions. I really don't trust that a software created division will be anywhere similar to using separate drives, JMO. A single primary mode partition should work fine

Cluster sizes, etc. Your formatting software can usually make better choices automatically than you can manually. Or be prepared to do a whole lot of reading.

Full formats have the advantage of re-allocating bad sectors. I usually do this on a used drive. On a new drive, the manufacturer may or may not have re-allocated all the bad sectors. Every drive has a few, new or used. Never noticed any problems either way.

I have one server with eight 320GB HDDs. I don't have the time to do full formats with all of them.

[ahhaa]

red- you must need a Mr. Fusion for your power supply!:]

I've noticed that XP reports space previously used by video as badly fragmented, so I was thinking one partition that was big but not impossibly big for frequent defragging, the other for a backup or image.

The other 'other thing' was multitasking... would a file copy faster going from one drive to another, or from one partition on the same drive to another?

[ahhaa]

oh yeah, and I keep forgetting to ask... once the USB drive is all setup and partitioned (as logical drives less than the 137 gig LBA barrier) would it be compatible with older mobo computers too?

[redwudz]

The 137GB size shouldn't be much of a problem, unless you mean really old MBs. Pre-2000. NTFS drives may not be compatible with some older MB's or operating systems.

Actually, I have two servers with eight hard drives each and they both run fine on 450W - 500W PS's. The startup draw is fairly high, but only momentary, and the average power isn't much higher than my other computers with two hard drives. And even a 450W can handle it. I ran one of them with a 350W PS for a while with no problems, but it was a cheap PS and I didn't trust it.

I don't want to really get into defragging, but I do it a few times a year at most with any of my drives. Just my methods.

Multitasking or any process that needs fast HDD transfers will always be better with separate drives and separate controllers or channels. All the partitions on a single drive will still be using the same single controller for the data transfers. Partitions don't mean anything to the drive controllers, just drives.