Text 19304, 74 rader
Skriven 2006-07-06 18:09:02 av Jeff Guerdat (1:275/311)
     Kommentar till en text av ED VANCE
Ärende: Re: What Should I Do?
=============================
ED VANCE wrote:
> Since my brother got his HP pc I've been more considering catching up
> with him in the pc world.   ;-]

Keeping up with the Joneses, eh?  ;)

> His pc has a 250GB HD, I don't know if i want or need anything that big.
> 
> I even see 300GB and 400GB drives advertised now a days.
> 
> I'm sure I'd want more than 40GB.
> 
> What size HD would you recommend I should get?

What is it you expect to do with the drive?  Unless you're going to get 
into digital imaging of some sort, a small one is plenty sufficient 
(small meaning 40GB or so).  I'd pay more attention to the drive's specs 
to try to get the best performance.  What you're looking for is arial 
density or, more simply, the fewest heads/platters for the capacity.  If 
they don't allow you to specify the drive, just make sure it's 7200 RPM. 
  You might want to consider SATA for the smaller cabling.

> I wonder how long it takes you to backup your HD (what size?),
> and how many CDs does it take?
> 
> Should I use CD-R or CD-RW disks, do you use CD-R or CD-RW disks for
> backup?
> 
> I'll probably have a DVD burner of some kind in the pc so I guess I
> should be asking how many DVD R or DVD RW
> (I don't know if it'd be a + or a - type DVD drive).

I used to use CD-RW and now use DVD+RW.  As you may have gathered from 
this echo, I'm in the minority with this strategy - others use another 
drive to image to.  CD/DVD is cheaper to get going but requires swaps of 
media and slows down the backup/restore process.  I don't care - price 
is more my issue and a little babysitting doesn't bother me.  Using 
rewritable media minimizes long-term cost but you could have many sets 
of media to allow you to go back further yet (I use 3 sets of media and 
rotate them so can only go back that far) - if you have the space and 
desire...

Even with a new system, it's apt to fill at least one DVD.  I use DVD+RW 
since I find it works better in my burner (a Plextor) - test and decide 
for yourself (most drives these days are + and -).  I'd recommend 
quality media since it's your data.  Better media will likely write 
faster, too.  I backup ~10GB and, with compression, it takes less than 2 
DVDs.  I should point out that my system has ~230GB of space with ~75GB 
used and I use a backup software package as opposed to an imaging package.

> Does making an Image copy the whole HD including the unused space on the
> drive?

Virtually all software ignores unused space *AS LONG AS IT CAN READ THE 
FILE SYSTEM*.  If it doesn't know how to handle the version of NTFS 
installed, it will likely have to backup the entire disk since it 
doesn't know what space is unused.  That's a long way of saying that you 
may need to update your software.

> If it does I reckon I'd make multiple Partitions like Langa showed
> recently in his newsletter.

Honestly, I prefer fewer partitions - one per drive unless I'm doing 
something specific, such as dual booting.  It's a personal choice, 
however...

> Should I use Compression in True Image or not?   Which way is better?

If you're imaging the disk rather than file copying, compression will 
save media and probably not cause a problem.  The CPU will generally be 
fast enough to compress on-the-fly without slowing the writer down, 
especially if you're using rewritable media which is slower to start with.
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