Recently I had to format my hard drive which resulted in me loosing everything. I figured this is a good point to A: Use some kind of backup, and B: Switch to Vista.
The main thing I use my PC for is gaming and browsing the net, but I am going to uni soon so there will be important stuff I can't afford to loose.
I've been thinking of a few options, but not sure which would be best or even if they are all possible.
For backing up files I was thinking of using a raid 1 configuration, so that If I needed to format again I would have duplicate of the original drive. But if I did decide to do this could I use an internal SATA drive / external USB drive combo, or does it have to be two SATA ones? My mobo manual says you can use an existing drive with a new drive with the same size or higher, but doesn't specify what type.
The reason I ask is because I found a 500GB USB drive with a faster transfer rate, same cache, and about the same price as my current 320GB SATA one + it would be one less thing inside my PC.
The other complication could be if I dual boot XP and vista using a a single drive partitioned in half, could I still then raid 1 that whole physical drive (with both XP and Vista partitions) with the external drive?
Another thing, in the tutorial sticky's at the top it says raid 1 takes (theoretically) twice as long to read from the disk, but why can't it just read from one drive seeing as they are the same?
The main thing I use my PC for is gaming and browsing the net, but I am going to uni soon so there will be important stuff I can't afford to loose.
I've been thinking of a few options, but not sure which would be best or even if they are all possible.
For backing up files I was thinking of using a raid 1 configuration, so that If I needed to format again I would have duplicate of the original drive. But if I did decide to do this could I use an internal SATA drive / external USB drive combo, or does it have to be two SATA ones? My mobo manual says you can use an existing drive with a new drive with the same size or higher, but doesn't specify what type.
The reason I ask is because I found a 500GB USB drive with a faster transfer rate, same cache, and about the same price as my current 320GB SATA one + it would be one less thing inside my PC.
The other complication could be if I dual boot XP and vista using a a single drive partitioned in half, could I still then raid 1 that whole physical drive (with both XP and Vista partitions) with the external drive?
Another thing, in the tutorial sticky's at the top it says raid 1 takes (theoretically) twice as long to read from the disk, but why can't it just read from one drive seeing as they are the same?
