External hard drive partitioning

[dkryan]

My ASUS laptop has a 640GB hard drive (so I thought) that is, in reality, two 320GB HDs. Those seem to be partitioned into C, D, F, and G drives, with C being 75GB in size and currently holding all program and system files.

The other three partitions are empty and hold 208GB/149GB/149GB, respectively.

I want to purchase an external HD to back-up my laptop. Can I and should I partition the external HD to emulate the laptop HDs?

I have zero experience with partitioning.

 

[The_Jeff]

I wouldn't. The bummer about too many partitions is when one grows until it's overflowing it's hard to resize everything to accomodate.

You could just as easily use subdirectories on the backup drive, or let its backup software do all the thinking.

If you have two physically seperate drives you can probably speed things up by moving your memory swap file, documents, music etc to the physical 2nd drive. Is generally good protocol to have executible programs on the C drive and data somewhere else.

 

[Carbon]

If I had that situation, I would consider replacing the C drive with an SSD (solid state drive).

 

[dkryan]

Originally Posted By: Carbon
If I had that situation, I would consider replacing the C drive with an SSD (solid state drive).


Why?

 

[cryption]

I wouldn't stress partitioning up the external. You can use a program like ghost to backup your computer, and you will only have the files ghost creates as the backup.

If anything you could split the external in half to have one half for backups only and the other half to use as you see fit.

 

[The_Jeff]

The present fad of SSD drives is your OS boots faster and programs start up faster b/c of no moving parts.

But they're murder for small bits of data going in and out, and expensive per byte, so one gets a large traditional data storage drive to go with.

Who knows where we'll be next year. If you're happy with your performance I wouldn't make any drastic changes. I *would* move the swap file though, gives the 2nd hard drive something to do while the 1st one is thrashing.

 

[Carbon]

Originally Posted By: dkryan
Originally Posted By: Carbon
If I had that situation, I would consider replacing the C drive with an SSD (solid state drive).


Why?


OS has lots of reads. SSDs are good at fast reads.

Boot speed and shutdown speeds would improve. A 40 GB SSD should hold the OS fine. The big advantage of mechanical drives is large size per dollar. An SSD for the OS and a mechanical drive for the data seems like the best of both worlds.

While SSD prices will drop, it would hardly be prescient to call SSDs a fad. That would be like people who said the Internet is a fad.

 

[Colt45ws]

Its kind of a hidden feature, but you can mount those other partitions as folders within C:/ drive. You could move the entire users folder on to say the 208 and then have disk management mount it to C:/Users and it would act like an extension off the 75GB. Same with the other two. Maybe a program files drive.

Or, you could delete the extra partitions and extend the C: to take the whole drive. It would be simpler that way...

 

[SrDriver]

I would also consider doing away with some of the partitions but would backup any important date beforehand.

 

[dkryan]

Okay, be patient and work with me here. How do I eliminate the other three partitions (empty) and have one 640 GB "C" drive?

Also, I try and think things like this through before I "pull the trigger," so lemme ask, "why would ASUS partition two 320GB HDs to begin with?

 

[Colt45ws]

So, you have two 320GB HDs. Not a single 640, right?

 

[dkryan]

Correct. OEM. Not by choice.

 

[greenaccord02]

I would create a raid volume with the two and make it either 640 with no redundancy or 320 mirrored, where your data would not be lost if one drive fails. In either case the operating system would view them as one unit.

 

[SrDriver]

I am assuming that you are running Windows 7? If so I would go ahead and buy that external hard drive and make a backup using the free backup software that comes with Windows 7. Make sure that you make the bootable CD.

If not, there is some other free options mentioned on this board.

I have used the following free software to resize NTFS partitions.

Link To GParted

Make sure that you do a backup BEFORE doing this!

 

[Colt45ws]

Originally Posted By: SrDriver
I am assuming that you are running Windows 7? If so I would go ahead and buy that external hard drive and make a backup using the free backup software that comes with Windows 7. Make sure that you make the bootable CD.

If not, there is some other free options mentioned on this board.

I have used the following free software to resize NTFS partitions.

Link To GParted

Make sure that you do a backup BEFORE doing this!



You can resize in the windows "Disk Management" I just did it to my Moms machine. I shortened C: from 750GB to 120GB and made the empty space a new D: partition. It can do the reverse, as well.