We can build it better, faster, stronger for under 6 million dollars

What we are building here is the drive layout for a PC containing 2 equal speed equal size hard drives.

We want speed for applications that need it such as gaming and video encoding as well as web cache. We want to secure our data on a partition other than the partition holding the main OS. This space will also be used to load applications that may contain user data and settings that we might want to preserve in the event we have to blow away the OS partition. Finally we need raw storage for video mostly that is not on a raid in the event we need to recover it. We could create a raid array for recovery purposes but it has always been my opinion that home or novice users need to maintain good backups as opposed to trying to recover data from a failed hard drive in a Raid 5 array.

The partitions needed will be from each drive in Gigabytes:

100
100
5
(final partition containing the remaining space)

You will have 100 on one drive for the OS. You do it this way because we are creating the Raid arrays using Microsoft Disk Management.

Then 2 100gig partitions will be used to create a Gaming or High speed stripped partition. If you want a bigger gaming array you can allocate more space or simply add another array later with the left over space being used for mass storage.

The 10gig array will be used for internet cache and for a very fast page file for both speed and privacy. It is very easy to wipe a small partition that might contain personal data that could be used to steal your identity or create profiles on your surfing habits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID














Click on the image below for more details: