Originally Posted by
maortega15
The current solution is slow and I'm not sure what it means if the hard drive spools up. I also want my data to be safe. Everytime I open up something like music or a video, the hd spools up and takes a few seconds before it loads up. I was expecting it to be instantaneous, but its not.
The spool-up is perfectly normal and harmless. When the drive goes unaccessed for long enough Windows spins it down to save power and wear on the bearings. This is a setting in the power management options in the control panel. It can't be read until it's been spun back up.
However, never trust *ANY* one drive to hold important stuff. You should have at least two copies.
As it stands now the most important stuff exists on drive C, a backup of all of C is on I as well as some incremental backups. I is actually 4 drives in a RAID 5 configuration (which means that it can survive the loss of any single drive and still deliver every byte that's stored there, albeit running slowly until the missing drive is replaced and the array rebuilt.) It's also copied to drive T which is sitting off on a shelf in a fire-resistant enclosure. It's also pushed to both Skydrive and SpiderOak (cloud storage).
The next tier of stuff--photos and the like--are on D which is a RAID 1 configuration (two drives in parallel, it will continue on if a drive fails. RAID 1 is a lot simpler than RAID 5 and delivers good speed without spending a bunch on a fancy controller. It's just not as efficient.) They're also copied to drive T and to another computer.