Background:
Because my Core Duo 2.4Ghz, 4GB RAM (Max 3GB addressed of course) XP SP2 MCE home PC was purchased for video rendering and resultant DVD authoring, as well as appropriate motherboard, CPU, and RAM it is specced accordingly on the HDD front, too; two 320GB 7500.10 SATA Barracudas, one 500GB 7500.11 SATA Barracuda, and two 1TB eSATA FreeAgent Pro external HDDs for primary and secondary data backup. Tertiary data backup is to a remote network storage location.
16 months down the line, performance remains stonking and (touch wood) I haven't need primary, let alone secondary or tertiary backups yet, although I do test them periodically.
Questions:
Although none of the backup devices are kept in the house - for fire, flood, and theft resistance - I would like to keep the primary FreeAgent device in the garage (a remote building of its own) for convenience. Never hotter (say 38 deg C) than HDD operating limits in the summer, it is none the less cold & dampish in the winter. If I use a plastic box that is only ever sealed and unsealed in the house and wait for the HDD to reach room temperature before using it, is storing it in the garage a sensible option as well as a convenient one?
Having invested considerable effort in to configuration, I wish to protect against HDD failure wiping out the o/s and program file partitions by cloning the disk they reside on. Is Norton Ghost as good as any other or should I look at other products?
The o/s and Program Files currently sit in two partitions on one of the 320GB 7500 RPM HDDs and together occupy about 18GB. Can I do the cloning to a 80GB 10,000 RPM Raptor or similar to gain further performance advantage (already blazing to be honest) as well as get a clone in the process? If so I will do this and use the Raptor, keeping the current 320GB HDD as backup.
TVM,
XV105