Help me decide - How would you do it?

Raistlin · 17-03-2005, 19:09

Ok, here's the scenario:

My Server (an old tower PC) has 3 HDDs in it.

1 x 4Gb
2 x 80Gb

At present the 4Gb HDD is designated as C: and is the main system drive. This drive currently only has Windows Server 2003, Apache, and PHP installed on it.

The two 80Gb drives are unformatted.

I want to split the drives down into some sort of logical partition structure to make it a bit easier to remember what is where, the problem is that I'm having problems deciding what sort of splits to apply to the drive.

I suppose the first question is, will a 4Gb drive be large enough for a purely system drive? I'm not intending to install any applications on it, any extra applications will be installed to a different partition on one of the other drives.

The second question is, what sort of splits would you apply to the other drives?

I'm thinking that it would be logical to partition them down so that I have seperate logical drives for each of the following areas:

Applications
Web Files (ie. Those files which will be served by Apache)
Backup (I have a Laptop with a 60Gb HDD and obviously I want to back the server system drive up. The Laptop won't neccessarily require a full 60Gb to backup, the intention is that most of the files I use/need will be stored on the server until required)
Files (a mixture of downloaded software etc, and personal files)

I'm open to suggestions on any other areas that you think I should have available as a seperate partition,along with any ideas on what sort of size I should allow for each of the sections above. The Files section won't need to be overly large, I'm intending to clear that out every now and then and transfer anything that I can to CD.

I'd also be interested in any ideas on the best way to restrict access to each of these areas. I'm intending to have only the Web Files section available to Apache, the Applications section probably only available from the server itself. Probably the only section that will be shared across the network is the Files section (and possibly a folder in the Backup section to allow me to backup the Laptop).

Also, anybody got any thoughts on the best way to backup the Server system drive and the Laptop? Ideally I'd like to be able to just copy the entire drive to somewhere safe so that it can be copied back in case of a failure but I'm sure it's not that easy.

Sorry for the length of the post, I'm all of a dither and I knew I could rely on someone here to give me some sage advice

iron25 · 17-03-2005, 20:32

First of all, ditch the 4gb drive as I'm assuming it is an old drive and therefore has a slower rpm and less cache than the others and the fact that you've installed the os on it means you've already slowed down your system. By how much, who knows. Another tip is to put your paging file on a different disk to your system files. Also, smaller partitions are better than larger ones and they also have the benefit of allowing you to just format part of the disk if need be instead of the whole disk. The following link has some useful information on setting up hard disks and ways to make them perform better.

http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/...TFS_Hacks.html

The bit about making your paging file fat32 is interesting.

Go to the link below for backup software:

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing...cts/trueimage/

I've got it but never used it so I can't tell you much about it but on the face of it, it looks good enough to do the job.

Raistlin · 17-03-2005, 20:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by iron25

First of all, ditch the 4gb drive as I'm assuming it is an old drive and therefore has a slower rpm and less cache than the others and the fact that you've installed the os on it means you've already slowed down your system. By how much, who knows.

Hmm, thought as much. Don't really want to go through the nause of re-installing the OS though. How would Windows cope if I copied the entire drive to a partition on another drive, deleted the original partition and then renamed the new partition to C: ? I'm assuming that's not going to work though because Windows would need to be running at the time?
Luckily there's not a lot on the machine so it's not going to be too difficult to do a fresh install.....

Quote:

Originally Posted by iron25

Another tip is to put your paging file on a different disk to your system files.

Yeah, reading that article it would appear that you shouldn't create any other partitions on that drive. That leaves me either having the page file on the (old and slow) 4Gb drive, or wasting an entire 80Gb drive on it

Quote:

Originally Posted by iron25

Also, smaller partitions are better than larger ones and they also have the benefit of allowing you to just format part of the disk if need be instead of the whole disk.

Hadn't realised that bit about the partition size, makes sense though now you mention it. Had already decided to keep the partitions as small as I thought I could get away with.

Quote:

Originally Posted by iron25

The following link has some useful information on setting up hard disks and ways to make them perform better.

http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/...TFS_Hacks.html

The bit about making your paging file fat32 is interesting.

Go to the link below for backup software:

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing...cts/trueimage/

Thanks for those links, I'll take a look at the backup software. I was considering something called Ghost Image (I'm sure that was it) that I saw a number of years ago, this would (presumably) allow me just to copy the entire image back onto the Laptop/Server partition if I needed to rather than having to do a complete re-install.....
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Looks like that Acronis software does the same thing

dilli-theclaw · 17-03-2005, 20:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by Raistlin

Hmm, thought as much. Don't really want to go through the nause of re-installing the OS though. How would Windows cope if I copied the entire drive to a partition on another drive, deleted the original partition and then renamed the new partition to C: ? I'm assuming that's not going to work though because Windows would need to be running at the time?
Luckily there's not a lot on the machine so it's not going to be too difficult to do a fresh install.....

See if you can get hold of norton ghost. I have used this in the past to 'clone' a windows install onto a larger hard disc

**Paul** · 17-03-2005, 20:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by Raistlin

Looks like that Acronis software does the same thing

Acronis is great - I have it installed on my machines - you can take an image of the pc while it is running.

maxtoralias · 17-03-2005, 21:03

See if you can get hold of norton ghost. I have used this in the past to 'clone' a windows install onto a larger hard disc

I have used Norton Ghost and it does a very effective job at cloning one hard drive to another, but I have also used Acronis True Image which is every bit as effective (down to preference I suppose.)
http://www.acronis.com/ and http://www.norton.com/

I would definitely get rid of the 4 GB drive as this will hamper overall system performance

My personal view would be to partition each drive into 2, so ending up with 4 partitions of 40GB. I would then use a partitionaing tool such as the excellent Acronis Partition Expert to resize each partition when you have settled on the most effective size for what you are using each partition for.(backup, personal files, etc.)

You could of course opt to split the drive into smaller partition sizes, particularly if you want to take advantage of the speed increase that arises by having a partition solely for use as a swap file (in this case 40GB would be more than overkill)

I would personally use NTFS as this is generally robust and using windows XP you have the option to selectively encrypt the contents of the drive on a folder level.

I do not beleive that there are hard and fast rules in these cases and you will adapt your requirementsover time to meet your changing needs.

Sorry if this has turned into a ramble, but hope it helps

iron25 · 17-03-2005, 21:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by Raistlin

Hmm, thought as much. Don't really want to go through the nause of re-installing the OS though. How would Windows cope if I copied the entire drive to a partition on another drive, deleted the original partition and then renamed the new partition to C: ? I'm assuming that's not going to work though because Windows would need to be running at the time?
Luckily there's not a lot on the machine so it's not going to be too difficult to do a fresh install.....

I recently used Acronis Migrate Easy to move the contents of a 40gb disk to a 120gb disk and it work like a charm. So if you have something like this then you don't need to re-install anything. However, if it's a fresh install then you're not going to lose anything apart from time.

Matth · 17-03-2005, 21:24

Just depends...
If your aiming to maximise "flat out" fileserver performance, then maybe having the system on a drive that is not used for data throughput, may help - if it forces you to pair it with one of the other drives, or pair them on the same cable, then forget it...

While the fast drive is not dragged down to the speed of the slow, the time taken in transferring at less than maximum speed eats into the time available for the faster drive.

If the 4Gb is, say, a fireball CR with ATA/66 transfer and, if I recall, a sustained transfer of 10Mb/s (the ATA/66 speed said to be irrelevant), then it would be a worthy drive, while a slower drive with only PIO4/MW2 DMA is less exciting.

Raistlin · 17-03-2005, 22:02

Right then, I've decided that the best way to go will be a complete re-install of the OS onto one of the new drives.

After that the drives will be partitioned as follows:

Disk 1:

C: - System (10Gb) <Server Only>
R: - Personal Files (20Gb) <Shared>
S: - Other Files (30Gb) <Shared>
T: - Applications (10Gb) <Server Only>
U: - Web (10Gb) <Apache>

Disk 2:

V: - Laptop Backup (30Gb) <Shared>
W: - Server Backup _ System (10Gb) <Server Only>
X: - Server Backup _ Applications (10Gb) <Server Only>
Y: - Server Backup _ Web (10Gb) <Server Only>
Z: - Files Backup (20Gb)

There's every chance that I've over thought this but, hell, I've got a new toy and I'm going to play

Once it's all installed and running I'll take a look at Acronis and Norton Ghost and see which seems to suit me best.

Thanks to everybody who's had an input into this thread, I'll let you know how I get on.

Raistlin · 17-03-2005, 23:37

Ummmm.....

What's the difference between a Primary Partition and a logical Drive?

One of my disks has been formatted as 1 Primary Partition and 4 Logical Drives during the Windows install.

The other can only be formatted as 4 Primary Partitions. I know that's a limitation of Windows but I was wondering if I've borked something up somehow?
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As you can see from my list above, I was kind of hoping for 5 partitions on each.....

iron25 · 18-03-2005, 00:06

I have two hard disks, one has seven partitions and the other six. It looks like you have gone slightly wrong in setting up the disk. What you should have is one primary partition followed by an extended partition of the remaining space. In the extended partition is where you would have the logical drives. As you can see in the image, the logical drives in blue are all grouped into one extended partition in green. Go here http://www.ntfs.com/logdrives.htm for a better explanation.

Raistlin · 18-03-2005, 00:29

Ok, thanks for that.

Got it sorted now.

Server is back up and running, all partitions as they should be.

All I have to do now is move the files from the Laptop to the Server, re-install the Laptop (back to the factory settings), and then get that patched, secure and all the software installed.

Whilst that's going on I need to be setting up Apache, PHP, Anti Virus, and backup software on the server and getting that secure and sorted.

Looks like I'm gonna be a busy boy

Cheers for all the help guys, I'll dedicate the first page on the Web part of the server to you