Secondary HD or NO

[dustywoodworker]

In a different thread "by Winchallenged" there has been a discussion about partitioning the OS and other folders on the same HD (C.

I felt a need to isolate my data files from the OS. To achieve this, I invested in a second internal HD. "I realize that this could have been achieved just as well with an external HD".

Now, as a result of that other thread, I am wondering if I should have just re-partitioned my C: drive to recover data space. Attached is an image of my disk system. Disk 1 is exactly as it was when I got the HD. It came to me as part of a new Dell XPS 8930.

To be stored on the other HD (Disk 0) are all of my woodworking plans and photographs.

The partition sizes are what I now wonder about. Could I (should I) have resized the partitions to gain storage and would that have significantly increased my risk of losing data should the HD fail.

 

[Bighorn]

What I see is you have 2 x 1TB drives. The one shown as Disk 1 is your System/Boot drive, only thing I would have done with it is plug the SATA data cable for the boot drive into Port 0 and the second drive into Port 1 on the motherboard and assure the BIOS has the correct Boot settings.

It is not a big issue having 2 internal drives, back in 80486 days I ended up with 3 x 345MB PATA drives in my computer running MS-DOS 6 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. A lot depends upon needs and the realization that multiple partitions on a drive don't guarantee there will be no loss of data, 1 partition can have problems or corruptions without affecting others but if the drive has physical/mechanical/electrical issues the whole drive can be failing so even with 2 drives backups/copies of critical data [that exists nowhere else] is still important.

One thing to keep in mind with both multiple partitions or multiple drives, the management of data location/s can be more time-consuming than one realizes at first.

 

[dustywoodworker]

I thought it strange that the OS was not on Disk 0 but this is the way it came from Dell.

Can I just swap the SATA port cables at the motherboard?

 

[Bighorn]

Can I just swap the SATA port cables at the motherboard?

I have done it several times, just had to make sure the BIOS was recognizing them correctly.

 

[dustywoodworker]

NO!! Yes I could but it would be more work than I want at this point. I just opened it up to see what I might see and the cables have all been "tailored and neatly routed" and pinned in place.

While in there I noticed a couple other differences from what I am used to. The SATA ports are labeled DS1, DS2, DS3 and DS4 and the system drive looks nothing like I have ever seen before. OPTANE, I think. Time for some research.