Harddrive Upgrade questions

[DeathScytheVT]

Built my computer over the fall with a 200GB Seagate 7200 RPM IDE hard drive. As of right now though, I have about 9GB remaining, filled the rest with the OS, games, Anime fan subs, etc, so I'm looking to add more.

I've been seeing a lot of stuff on these boards about people having a small HDD for the OS, and larger ones for everything else. Is there any real advantage to doing this? And would the small one have JUST the OS, or would other programs have to go on there as well?

Also, having all those files, it would suck to have the drive crash, so I assume I'd need some form of backup, but on a large scale I'm not sure what to do. I've heard of linking multiple drives together with RAID or something like that, but never have messed with it or seen a detailed description on how it works.

I guess i'm just looking for some HDD setup examples, and how they work.

Thanks for any help

 

[airfoil]

IMO, buying a smaller drive is a wasted effort.

I'd suggest you buy another HDD that is >=200 GB, and use the faster of the two for the OS, after partitioning it the way you like it.

 

[DeathScytheVT]

What exactly is partitioning good for? One of my friends partitioned off a bit for use with a UNIX OS for one of our classes, but other than that I've never really seen it used.

 

[valkator]

I dunno but have you ever thought of like a 300GB maxtor like diamond max 10 series. They are pretty cheap like 180 bucks. Hell for something of that size (about 279 formatted) i think that is pretty darn good

raid a couple of them babies together if you want and that will give you some performance