What's the best way to set up these HDDS?

[A.Nonymous]

So the hard drive on my computer was dieing a slow death. It's barfing SMART errors and whirring like a helicopter. I wasn't entirely sure which of the hard drives was dieing, but one of them was. So I went out and found a pair of 2 TB HDDs for $100 a piece and bought them.

Previously I had a 90 GB SSD as a boot drive, 1.5 TB drive for programs and 1.5 TB for data storage. I've now determined that the drive I was dumping my programs on is the one that has died.

Now I want to use one of these 2 TB drives to expand my storage partition. So I've got 2 TB of storage now. My question is what to do with the other one. Should I use it to mirror my storage drive? I plan to use the 1.5 GB that I was using for storage to replace my programs drive. or should I use the 2 TB drive for something else?

 

[alostpacket]

Mirroring is always good. External NAS is good too. Are they "low power/eco" drives?

Depending on your data though 2TB can be gobbled up quite quickly. You may want to stick with an almost similar setup as you have now.

I do like your graphic description of a dying HD though lol..

 

[SUroot]

It depends what you want. For me, redundancy is paramount. With 2 drives, this can only be achieved with RAID one as mentioned above.

I personally have RAID 5 NAS, no local redundancy but /home, /usr and /lib* backed up to the NAS

 

[A.Nonymous]

I don't have an external NAS sadly. I suppose I could haul out an old box and format it with some NAS like OS, but I don't have enough drives to set up a RAID 5 (though I prefer RAID 10 myself). The programs drive not being redundant doesn't bother me all that much as I can easily re-install my programs if I must and I don't have any information stored there.

The are low powered drives which I'm not a fan of at all in general, but when your hard drive is dieing you take what you can get.

 

[SUroot]

You could just mirror the lot if its a desktop... programs and OS don't use much space...