Dear Internet Friends…
I need some advice about how to organize data on my hard drives.
My computer is an Athlon 1600+ with 1 gig of SDRAM. The motherboard has USB 1.1 and IDE onboard, and a SATA PCI card and a USB 2.0 PCI card. I have the following hard drives (all 7200 RPM):
- C: is an 80 gig Seagate IDE ATA/100 drive on its own IDE channel.
- E: is a 120 gig Seagate SATA drive.
- F: is a 120 gig Maxtor IDE ATA/100 drive on an IDE channel which it shares with D:, my 8x DVD-ROM drive. (I’ve burned out three CDROM drives ripping my CD collection, a task which is only 3/4ths complete.) F: is also the oldest drive in my machine (about 3 years old, I think. It has seen heavy use for 1.5 of those years.)
- H: is a 320 gig Maxtor USB drive, which I purchased to implement some sort of backup strategy.
I want to put the following things on those drives:
- First off, C: is obviously home to windows and all my programs. All files not listed below can comfortably fit on this drive.
- I need a location for my page file.
- I need a location for my iTunes library (69.2 gigs).
- I need a location for my Lightroom library. I’m gonna start a new one from scratch, but I have 69 gigs of JPG files and 18.2 gigs of CR2 files to put in there. (I shoot, on average, 1.5 gigs of photos a week with the new camera.)
- I need about 50-60 gigs for the storing and working on of digital video projects I undertake from time to time.
Keeping in mind the following considerations:
- I’d like some sort of backup strategy here, as of right now, virtually none of this data is backed up. (except for all of my CDs, which I could re-rip I guess)
- In terms of measured speed, the drives rank (fastest to slowest): F, C, E, H. I think this is because the IDE is onboard and the SATA isn’t.
- I’d like to keep the page file off the same drive as the iTunes library. This has proven to be a losing strategy in the past.
- I tend to run 10-15 firefox windows with 8-12 tabs in each, iTunes, 1 or 2 instances of Visual Studio, Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop Elements and $antivirus_program, usually all at once. Folding@Home takes all of my “spare” computing cycles. I have a virtual desktop manager with 6 virtual desktops (and still I need two rows for my taskbar!) and hop from project to project as I wish.
- The above bullet may sound ridiculous, but I used to do that with 512 megs of memory. Fun anecdote from the 512 meg days: once a bad storm was coming, I mean really bad lightning and a tornado watch. I went upstairs to shut down my computer “real quick”; the storm came and left before I was half done.
- When I’m editing digital video, I shut everything else down. Hey, I’m not that stupid!
- I occasionally run VMware to test some software development projects. If I have to do that, I’ll shut most stuff down; see previous bullet point.
Right now:
- The pagefile is on F:.
- iTunes library is on E:.
- Digital video projects are on F:.
- Pictures are scattered among hundreds and hundreds of inconsistently named folders strewn about on all 4 drives.
- The backup drive is not living up to its name.
I’m leaning towards organizing and putting all photos in folders on E: or F:, since greater than 2/3rds of the photos are organized this way (they’re just not all in one place). I’d like to put my Lightroom library on the USB drive (so E would become picture backup), but I’m concerned about performance. If I do this, where should the iTunes library go? Do I need to backup my iTunes library? When should I put the 120 gig Maxtor out to pasture?
Also, Steve and or Ben: HDTune says my internal drives are running about 32-38 degrees C depending on what they’re doing. You guys design (or have designed) hard drives for a living. Are my drives running too hot?
Finally, I love you crazy internet people, and while I really appreciate your suggestions for what computer hardware I should buy next, for various reasons more computer hardware is not in my foreseeable future. Don’t let that stop you from suggesting, and I’ll think about it more in a few months, but the question I really need answering right now is: What should I do today to help my data storage problems?
January 23rd, 2007 at 8:02 pm
It sounds like your long-term needs indicate that you’re going to need a bigger drive for photos than any of your existing internal drives. If you haven’t been using the external 320GB drive for anything, you might want to consider swapping it out with one of the internal drives (it sounds like you’re concerned about the oldest 120GB drive, so that might be a good choice).
For the iTunes library, does it need to reside on this PC, or are there any other systems you have lying around that might be suited to the task? I’ve found that iTunes works surprisingly well over a network (with the caveat that there are some things, like rating files, that you can’t do with a remote library).
January 23rd, 2007 at 9:09 pm
My bios is old and broken and won’t let me install an IDE drive larger than 120 gigs. I may be able to install a sata drive larger than that, but I am unsure if that is true.
My ipod strategy requires accurately rated songs, although when I get a new machine to replace this one, that sounds like a very good idea. I could just remote into this PC to rate and add new songs.
January 24th, 2007 at 12:22 am
I have all of my photos and music on an external 320GB drive and am working on backing that all up on DVD. That seems to work for me.
By the way I still beat you on music, but you kicked my ass on photo GBs.
January 24th, 2007 at 7:50 am
Do I beat you in total number of photos? Over 55,000 at current count, but that’s *all* jpgs on my system so that’s probably not accurate. I know I’ve spun my image counter over twice on my Nikon and at least once on the Canon, so we’re talking at least 30,000 photos, plus a couple thousand photos from when I would borrow digital cameras in the pre-Nikon days.
January 24th, 2007 at 11:39 am
I currently have 28,224 photos in my database. That doesn’t count a large unknown number that I deleted because they were out of focus or just plain crappy pictures.
January 29th, 2007 at 12:56 am
Observation #1: You can’t squeeze blood from a stone. If you want the space for video editing you are probably just going to need another drive, whenever it is you can get one.
Observation #2: I’ve had 3 (three) in use hard drives fail on me. 4 if you count the Tivo. My dad has had 2, and I’m currently fixing someone else’s Tivo after the HD croaked. I have lost data with HD failures.
Observation #3: You will be very unhappy with yourself and life in general if a HD goes with your unbacked up pictures. We are talking seriously unhappy - I’m guessing pics of your daughter that you do NOT want to loose.
Observation #4: You won’t get around to completely reorganizing your crap for a long time. This I know from personal experience with my own crap. Accept it and act accordingly.
Solution #1: RIGHT NOW - I’m dead serious.
1) Empty USB drive of all things non-backup.
2) Create 3 folders on USB drive:
- Seagate80
- Seagate120
- Maxtor120
3) Copy entire contents of 120 GB maxtor into folder Maxtor120. Wait til finished (may be several hours if the disk is full)
4) Copy entire contents of 120 GB Seagate to Seagate120. Ditto
5) Copy enitre contents of 80 GB Seagate to Seagate80. (Yeah, just drag it all over, don’t worry about being tidy.)
6) Breath a sigh of relief. Your data is safe(r)
January 29th, 2007 at 1:23 am
Now that that is done, (and I’m entirly serious, I hope by the time you start reading this message, the first HD is copying onto the USB drive :-) I can try to offer my suggestion about drive arrangement. (I wish I could recommend an app for syncing data like that on windows, but I only know a mac program for doing it. Maybe look for a cheap copy of Norton Ghost?)
At one point I investigated moving pagefiles around to different drives at work, and what I found was the speed improvements were negligible relative to the hit you take from being in swap (at least in WinXP.) so I’d probably just leave the swap on your 80GB system disk and not worry about it.
Dump your iTunes library on one of the 120GB disks, (prolly the Maxtor - this drive will not change much and therefore the backup will always be fresh.) Say your gonna grow it’s library to 90GB eventually, as a guess. So, take 20GB of the oldest pictures, or whichever pile you are unlikely to muck with much, and stick them on that drive too.
Now, on the other 120GB drive, put your lightroom library and the remainder of your photos. Put new photos here. Whatever free space you have can be devoted to video editing while the space lasts.
Be religious about imaging your drives. Find a program that can do it efficiently in windows. I sync the Macbook(120gb) and MacMini(80gb) internal drives, as well as the 300gb external drive onto a 500gb external drive about once a week using a cool program called SuperDuper that keeps two drives in sync. If the Maxtor croaks, no biggie, you have a backup.
I really am paranoid about backup. I don’t format the CF card until I’ve burnt the pictures onto a DVD :-) I’ve been burnt(haha, unintentional bad pun) too many times.
January 29th, 2007 at 11:39 pm
John, a side question (because I’m the last person who should be giving backup advice): what virtual desktop manager do you use, and would you recommend it?
February 6th, 2007 at 7:52 am
I started replying here but the comment got too unwieldy, so I moved it to it’s own post. Short answer: VirtuaWin, and yes I recommend it.