Hard Drive: 80GB VS 500GB. Defragmenting and formatting speed.

[vid83]

My desktop is arriving Friday with Vista installed.
It is 500GB. I may take that drive out and replace it with 80GB (I have a large external hard drive) and put XP on it.
For defragmenting or formatting a computer, will there be a big noticeable difference in speed if I got an 80GB drive?

[JohnnyMalaria]

For defragmenting, it depends how much stuff is on there. If you had, say, 10GB of used space, it would take about the same time.

Formatting a completely virgin drive will likely take about a factor of 6-7 longer for the 500GB.

[vid83]

Formatting a completely virgin drive will likely take about a factor of 6-7 longer for the 500GB.

Are you saying that if it normally takes 1 hour to format an 80GB drive, it would take 6 to 7 hours to format a 500GB drive?

[vid83]

Could I partition the 500GB drive to make one partition 80GB just for the operating system. If I ever need to do a format to reinstall XP, will that delete the other partition?

[jagabo]

The difference isn't that big. The larger drive is probably faster too (higher density + same spin rate = more bits per rotation). Probably more like 3 hours. I just formatted a 1.5 TB drive. I didn't time it but it didn't take 20 hours!

[JohnnyMalaria]

Formatting a completely virgin drive will likely take about a factor of 6-7 longer for the 500GB.

Are you saying that if it normally takes 1 hour to format an 80GB drive, it would take 6 to 7 hours to format a 500GB drive?

1 hour for an 80GB seems long. I installed a 1TB SATA drive not so long ago. It took a while but probably not even an hour.

The time it takes depends on a number of things including whether you can use the quick format option or not. External USB2.0 drives can take forever (well, it seems like it).

[guns1inger]

Could I partition the 500GB drive to make one partition 80GB just for the operating system. If I ever need to do a format to reinstall XP, will that delete the other partition?

Whenever I build a new system box, I install a smaller drive (80 GB is good) for the system and applications, then larger drives for data and working space. I can then easily image and replace the system drive if necessary, without disturbing the rest of the system. There are also some performance improvements to be had by using multiple drives over partitioned drives, especially when one partition is for system use.

My current system has an 80 GB SATA system drive, a 500 GB SATA internal drive partitioned into two area for working space and projects, plus 3 TB of external drive for archival storage and media storage.

[redwudz]

I find a smaller boot drive the better choice, mostly for restoration if it starts to fail.
If you are running Vista, it schedules automatic defrags of the drives, so I don't bother doing it manually.

If you partition the boot drive, that's not the same as a separate drive. The drive is still being accessed often by the OS by the same controller channel as the boot partition, and that affects the performance of the other partitions.

I like three drives, a small boot, and two larger drives, one for edits and the other for archiving. But if you already have a large boot drive, you could also just use it for archiving and long term storage. Just avoid capturing or using it for any disc intensive activities. I would consider leaving it as is and just adding some more drives. A lot easier.

And I rarely do a full format of a new drive. Just a quick format. A used drive is different, those I will normally fully repartition and reformat. One of my servers has nine 320GB drives. That would take a very long time to fully format them all. But that just my method.

[DarrellS]

Count me as a small boot drive user also. I wanted an 80GB boot drive for this machine but the guy I bought the drive from was out of 80GB drives so I had to settle for a 160GB SATA drive. It's getting hard to find drives under 500GB unless you buy online.

[budz]

Yup, yup I use only 80gb sata hard drives for OS & use 500gb - 640gb sata hd's for storage space.

[djancak]

My desktop is arriving Friday with Vista installed.
... I may take that drive out and replace it with 80GB (I have a large external hard drive) and put XP on it.

You need to be careful trying to replace your OS with XP.

It's possible you may not be able to find drivers for some of
the devices in your computer, which means they may not work.

A program you can use that will assist in finding drivers is
Driver Detective. There are other programs available for this
but I have not used any of them.

Just make sure you don't wipe the Vista disk until you know
everything is working on XP. And make sure you have an
installation disk if you ever decide you want to put Vista back on it.

[Nelson37]

An increase in formatting speed, yes. Do you intend to do this often?

Defrag speed, in real-world usage, probably but not necessarily. Do you wait breathlessly for this to finish?

I would be more concerned with speed while actually using the computer to do useful work, which, depending on speed and throughput of the drives being compared, might very likely SLOW DOWN.

A seperate OS drive is a generally good idea, but replacing a hi-performance drive with an older, slower one might very well represent a net loss in performance.

Use it to test XP with the original Vista drive completely removed, sure.

[vid83]

An increase in formatting speed, yes. Do you intend to do this often?

Probably not. This drive is the operating system drive. I will probably only format every 6 months to a year unless I encounter a problem (virus, slow computer, etc.).
If formatting is only going to take 1hr to 2 hr. for a 500GB drive, then that won't be a problem.
My laptop that crashed took 45 minutes to format (recovery CD) the hard drive. By format I mean using a recovery CD but since my new computer will be downgraded to XP and I won't have a recovery CD, format will mean inserting the XP retail CD and doing a re-install.

[guns1inger]

Which is why you want to set it once, then make your own recovery disc with a drive imaging program. I like Acronis TrueImage, but there are several others that will work.

[vid83]

Which is why you want to set it once, then make your own recovery disc with a drive imaging program. I like Acronis TrueImage, but there are several others that will work.

I've looked at Acronis and Norton Ghost but both have such bad reviews that I don't know what else to use.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Really? I have Acronis and am very happy with it. Anything that starts with 'Norton' on the other hand...

Of course, I've never had to restore my system so the pudding has yet to be tasted. I've restored a partition and files here and there but haven't needed to whip out the special recovery CD that TrueImage creates after a total hosing.

[guns1inger]

I don't know what reviews you have been reading of Acronis, but I use it at home and at work, and it works flawlessly. At work we write and read images across the network and it outperforms Ghost for speed at around 3 : 1.

My first use at home was to rescue a system drive that had started to throw bad sectors. I ran a chkdsk with surface scan to mark the sectors a bad, created an image with True Image to a USB drive, then took the PC back to have the system disc replaced under warranty. Got it home, and had it all back and running in under 40 minutes. Since then I re-image after any major change to the system disc.

[vid83]

Is Acronis/Ghost a recovery disc maker except you have your own installed software on there rather than the manufacture's (HP, Dell, ...) softwares?

[guns1inger]

Acronis runs from a bootable CD and makes a bit for bit image of your drive to another drive - internal, external or network. This means it has all your settings, customisations and installed applications included. Most recovery discs either completely wipe the drive and install just the bare minimum, including all the junk apps that every supplier includes, or if it is a smarter recovery disc, might do this without wiping your data.

With Acronis (or Ghost, or Drive Image etc), you install your OS, add all your apps, and configure everything to your liking, then you take what is effectively a snapshot of the entire drive and store it somewhere for safe keeping. You can re snapshot at any time, and Acronis allows you to do incremental snapshots as well, which is good for backing up or testing software and rolling back again. The full Acronis suite even allows you to migrate a desktop from one machine to another while replacing drivers etc as required, however I don't believe the home version offers this.

[vid83]

For HP recovery disc, whenever I have a problem, I insert the recovery disc and it does a full format of the hard drive and installs everything to the way it was when I first purchased my PC.

With HP recovery CD, after recovery, you have to go back and install everything that was not on the recovery CD (Premiere Pro, MS Word, etc.). I understand that with Acronis, it creates a copy of your drive all the software you have installed remains intact. For Acronis, when something goes wrong, what do I do? Do I insert a CD? Does the drive get fullyl formatted and then the content of the image CD gets copied onto the hard drive?

[vid83]

I don't know what reviews you have been reading of Acronis, but I use it at home and at work, and it works flawlessly. At work we write and read images across the network and it outperforms Ghost for speed at around 3 : 1.

Review page:
Newegg (3/5 stars): http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16832200008
Amazon (2.5/5 stars): http://www.amazon.com/Acronis-True-Image-Home-2009/product-reviews/B001DSGXFY/ref=pd_b...owViewpoints=1

[guns1inger]

To be honest, I put very little faith in customer reviews on sites like that. They always tend to be skewed toward the disgruntled who have often had bad experiences of their own making. They either have unrealistic expectations of the product, didn't read the manual, or simply got it wrong.

As for support - we use Acronis for imaging laptops and desktops, and reimage hundreds each year. We have purchased only one True Image license, and yet when we found that we could not use the boot disc on newer model desktops, Acronis made available nightly builds until the issue was resolved. Yes, it took them 3 nights (we being in Australia, an overnight wait was not unreasonable), but we got a nwe cutom build each morning until we were running again. I have rarely seen support this good, and it has been repeated on several occassions a our hardware has changed.

But hey, I can only speak about my experiences with the product.

[slacker]

Most of the techy sites give bad reviews of the latest Acronis version. These bad reviews do not apply to earlier versions. Everyone is waiting to see what Acronis does to fix their current release. (Kind of like Adobe with CS4.)

The two top backup programs (from researchig the web) are Paragon Backup or Paragon Hard Disk Manager, and ShadowProtect Desktop by StorageCraft. They are both highly rated consistently.

The choice for me came down to features, stability and support. Paragon stability and support is exceptional, Acronis stability (with the new release) and support is terrible FOR THE LITTLE GUY. On the other hand, if you have a larger installation, they'll fall down all over themselves trying to help you.

Mark

[slacker]

With regard to Vista XP swaps...

As a business and personal technology consultant I would never recommend leaving the train, i.e. replacing Vista with XP, even if XP is perceived as the better OS. The future is NOT XP, for better or worse. Vista is here and Windows 7 is coming. And the train is leaving the station. Unless a certain business or critical personal application demands XP, I would view installing XP as a total waste of time.

And small drives dedicated to the OS...

I understand the practice. However, an 80gb drive for Vista is too small, and will definitely be too small for Windows 7. A small drive to me is 120-160gb. Remember, Vista grows with age at geometric proportions care of the winsxs folder.

Anyway, I guess I would keep Vista on the 500gb drive, and buy yourself a couple of internal / external 1-2 terabyte drives. I am ALWAYS running out of space.

And BTW, always quick format new drives, full format old drives. My new terabyte drives were up and running in a couple of minutes. However, the day before yesterday I cloned a 1 terabyte drive using Paragon Hard Disk Manager. ETA? 34.4 hours. Same time frame goes for wiping drives. Ouch.

As a suggestion for the 500gb drive, you could always partition the drive into two volumes, one for the OS, and one to store several of those full system backups you are going to do with Acronis or Paragon. Right?

Have fun!

Mark

[Nelson37]

Well, I use an older version of Ghost, 7.1, used it for many, many years on many, many drives. It is one of very few pieces of software which I can say has NEVER failed. Not once.

I don't store image files, I image the entire drive onto a workable second drive. Backup can be up and running within seconds if needed, and easily tested and verified.

Have never used Acronis, though I have heard good things about it.

Don't like partitioning. Needless complication. If the partition table fails, data is gone. If drive fails, ALL partitions are gone. If you want/need a seperate drive, get a seperate piece of hardware.

An image file stored on the same drive is not a backup. That's like keeping your fire insurance policy taped to a wooden door. It ain't gonna be there when you really need it.

Formatting - I always use full format, unless I just want a quick erase. Would you rather find out the drive has serious errors BEFORE spending many hours installing OS and Software, or realize the problem AFTER all that work disappears or is wasted? A full format gives a better chance to find any serious errors.

The OS "train" is simply a vehicle to get the user running the apps they want to run. IMO, Vista is a fancy new excursion trip to a destination few want to go to. XP may be old but is currently the better OS for most, IMO.

[vid83]

I have to stay with XP a little longer because I have a project in Premiere Pro 1.5 that I have been working on and have not finished when my laptop crashed. Otherwise I would definitely stay with Vista.

[DereX888]

My desktop is arriving Friday with Vista installed.
... I may take that drive out and replace it with 80GB (I have a large external hard drive) and put XP on it.

You need to be careful trying to replace your OS with XP.

It's possible you may not be able to find drivers for some of
the devices in your computer, which means they may not work.

A program you can use that will assist in finding drivers is
Driver Detective. There are other programs available for this
but I have not used any of them.

Just make sure you don't wipe the Vista disk until you know
everything is working on XP. And make sure you have an
installation disk if you ever decide you want to put Vista back on it.

How hard is it to type manufacturer's address and search for latest drivers?
Even if manufacturer is unknown, it is not that hard to find out all info nowadays.
DON'T use any junk like "driver detective"!

Also virtually any hardware that has Vista drivers will have XP drivers (it just doent work the other way around, XP->Vista). There are maybe handful devices that require Vista (if that many at all).

Sheesh, what an ill-adviced post you have wrote, djancak.

With regard to Vista XP swaps...

As a business and personal technology consultant I would never recommend leaving the train, i.e. replacing Vista with XP, even if XP is perceived as the better OS. The future is NOT XP, for better or worse. Vista is here and Windows 7 is coming. And the train is leaving the station. Unless a certain business or critical personal application demands XP, I would view installing XP as a total waste of time.

And small drives dedicated to the OS...

I understand the practice. However, an 80gb drive for Vista is too small, and will definitely be too small for Windows 7. A small drive to me is 120-160gb. Remember, Vista grows with age at geometric proportions care of the winsxs folder.
/.../

As a business you probably have one or another type of msdn/msoft subscription. Obviously it is better *for you* to stay with whatever is microsoft's current for many reasons. But I digress. I'd argue about what "current" is?

I have very current Windows 2000 on my PC. Yes I know it is not "latest' Msoft offering, but it *is* current (meaning it does support all the current hardware out there, and almost all the current software as well - with few exceptions that were written for XP-or-Vista-only). I also have very current XP PC. There is literally nothing hardware- or software-wise I am missing by not having Vista PC, additionally it's 4GB of RAM just purr on a W2K PC (which would have been wasted on Vista's DRM and GUI crap otherwise) and the machine simply fly like a jet compared to my office Vista box with same hardware, yet according to your logic I don't have "current" computers? LOL!
The only argument for Vista I can ever think of is the gaming, especially games based on latest DirectX (another Msoft-centric monopoly). But you, as a business, you don't care about latest DX, don't you?

I'll argue about the future too.
Obviously it is not with any Windows at all, as the IBM's OS/2 code that is base for all NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/7 has been squeezed like a lemon in past 25 years and it won't get Msoft any further. Windows 7 is Vista on diet, there is nothing new to it (however it is the very first time for Msoft to slimmer-down NT's GUI, which they normally have always inflated with "new" options). If Microsoft will not buy or steal someone else's new OS code like they did with DOS (base for Windows 3/95/98/ME) and OS/2 (base for NT3/NT4/2000/XP/Vista/7), it probably can't progress any further. It is the biggest company in the world (software-wise) but their R&D is almost non-existent. 20,000 coders it hires are not being paid for advanced thinking but for writing lines of code and that's the secret of why the same NT code with simple Win9x GUI (aka Windows 2000) has overgrown to so many lines of code as Vista (same NT code with elaborate new GUI).
Yes, the "train has left the station", but it is not with Vista or Win7 - it probably happened when first linux distro was released (some manufacturers have missed it, and many of us haven't jumped on board either because of that too - but it is at the tipping point nowadays, major distros are already user-friendly and ready to use by Average Joes straight out of the box for "standard EBC use" meaning Email/Browse/Chat, and if the gaming software companies will also start writing for it, it will roll out like Win95 did in its time).

As for smaller drives. I agree, it doesn't have to be small "small drive", but it is still better when there are at least 2 separate drives (1 for windoze, 2nd for apps, swap, user's files etc). If you look at XP's or Vista's hotfixes backups, you'll notice it keeps plenty of useless backups. Specially Vista is so "stupid" in this practice. I have cleaned my friend's laptop drive not long ago because she ran out of space on 80GB hard disk because Vista kept gigabytes of backup'd files dating as far as pre-SP1 there (thats right - what is the point to keep backup of replaced files for a hotfix installed more than year ago? Even if the user would like to restore them manually - because obviously system restore can't go back in time that far - it is still impossible to work properly due to consecutive newer hotfixes that were installed later, and anyways why would anyone go back to unpatched version of files on a *windows* computer).
The "growth" of Vista is just smoke and mirrors.
It creates useless backups of files / system states (useless because they are anyways impossible or not feasible to restore after some time, yet it does not prune them obsolete files after that time). In that area Vista have to be taken care of manually by the user, or it will - as you've said it - it will grow at geometric proportions uselessly.

[ahhaa]

I've looked at Acronis and Norton Ghost but both have such bad reviews that I don't know what else to use.

I can recommend Clonezilla; a free open source alternative to Ghost, can be used as LiveCD or even runs from USB flash drive. It gets good reviews; especially useful if you decide on adding multiboot and/or linux.
http://clonezilla.org/

an afterthought tho...
with Seven coming out so soon, and many bloggish comments about how lean & mean it is (compared to both XP and Vista), you might want to get ahold of a beta version and check it out on the 80G before doing the XP install.

[slacker]

DereX888,

I can understand your frustration with imperfection from an intellectual point of view. Pragmatically, however, I can't agree at all. It is a waste of time to support multiple operating systems and time is a finite resource.

The only reason you can get by with Windows 2000 today is that the 3rd party vendors are still around and, rather than dump their old code, they typically make it available to the public. It doesn't cost them a dime.

XP is still fresh enough that the general 3rd party support is there because of the large installed base, regardless of what Microsoft does. BUT all new development is being done for the future, not the past.

Bottom line is if you have XP I wouldn't upgrade to Vista. BUT if you have Vista I wouldn't downgrade to XP. The advantages of doing so in each case aren't worth the effort.

Mark

[slacker]

vid83,

One of the best sites I have found for discussing backup software (and other software and services) with highly informed users is http://www.wilderssecurity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=48.

They discuss commercial as well as free software.

http://ghost.radified.com/ is strictly for, you guessed it, ghost users. However, they also have a great section on other products both commercial and free.

There are some fantastic free disk imaging and backup software products out there. I chose to go commercial simply for the additional features and backend support.

Mark