HARD DRIVES

It is difficult to buy a computer today with less than a 1.0 gig drive, and 1.6 gig or more is commonplace. And even the bargain basement computers have space for more drives in one of the bays. To be honest, I didn't know exactly what to do with all that space until very recently. I didn't really have a point of view. Until now I have been working with a 1 gig internal and a 1 gig external, using the external drive as a mirror. I think of it the perfect backup. The external is a SCSI drive so it attaches to any one of my computers with no difficulty, so even if the main computer blows up, I can set up shop on the next one without delay. Each computer can access it on the local network as well. Neither drive is partitioned.

Three developments led to a big change in my plans. First, I found an irresistible bargain in a 2.9 gig SCSI top-of-the-line drive. I bought it and paid less than one third the price of the first 10 meg hard drive I bought for my Macintosh. Second, I kept reading about how wasteful a non-partitioned hard drive can be. Bad news indeed. Third, I realized that I rarely if ever take time to use the reference material on CD-ROM because it is too much trouble to locate the disk, take out a disk, put in the new one, search for the icon, etc., etc. All these forces merged and prodded me into rethinking my use of all this hardware. In truth, a fourth element intervened as well. Somehow, I got a copy of Partition Magic™ with one of my purchases. It just sort of laid there for several weeks until all of this started to happen.

We (Peter TY1PS and I) hooked up the new drive and partitioned it into four 700+ meg drives. Wow! That's in addition to a two meg SCSI inside the new computer. Oh yes, some it will be used for back up, but that still leaves the equivalent of 36 football fields of space.

Suddenly, a light went on. Could I copy a CD-ROM to a hard disk? How much space would it take to put Microsoft's Bookshelf on the hard drive? 640 megs? That's a lot but not unreasonable at these prices. I began to play with the CD-ROM and copied it all to the SCSI. I was amazed to discover that the entire program, with all the sound files and trimmings, occupied less than 500 megs. Imagine my delight to find I could access it at less than a 10 millisecond speed and always have it a mouse click away right there on drive H. The difference is speed is very noticeable.

Enter Partition Magic™. This small program is almost, but not quite magic. Run it from the A drive, despite what the manual says about installing it on a hard drive. An urgent notice packed with the disk contradicts the manual, but there are redeeming features to the manual which we shall touch on later. Within a couple of minutes, I brought up the disk drive on the DOS screen and reduced the size of drive H from 700 to 500 megs. Since Bookshelf is a read-only program very little space is required beyond the actual file size.

Saving 200 megs is only part of the story. By dropping the total size from 700 to 500 megs, the minimum required cluster size dropped from 16kb to 8kb as well. This substantially reduces the waste space on that partition and delivered about a 10% bonus. It gets much worse with larger partitions. For example, if you do not partition a 2 gig drive, it is probable that 40 % of the drive is wasted because of the 32kb cluster size.

Off to the races! The next thing I did was move about 300 megs of graphic files to drive G from four different CD-ROM disks. All of them are now a mouse click or two away. Next, I will look at the library of unused CD-ROMs and decide what others might be candidates for inclusion. This is a new world of easy-access and I like it. Not all CD-ROMs like it at all, of course. Some won't execute from any other source, but we will keep working at the problem.

Partition Magic does many other things, of course. But it can be said that it partitions and sizes, resizes, formats, sets up dual-boot and all of that sort of thing extremely well. PM is fast, simple, easy-to-watch software that is single-minded. Essentially, it takes over all of the ancient, complicated DOS hard drive commands and executes them in an environment all of us will find easy to use.

There's more. The manual, despite the glitch mentioned above, is the finest tutorial on hard drive theory and management that I have ever seen. Bar none. It is state-of-the-art teaching of a kind rarely seen in manuals for any product. This part of the manual, all by itself, is worth the purchase price of about forty bucks. I strongly recommend it for all those who have entered the age of 'unlimited' space. PM is available for less than $30! Now, Quarterdeck has entered the arena at the same price level with a new Win95 program called Partition-It. It is a bit superior to PM mainly because of the improved graphic interface. PI allows for changing drive sizes on the fly! You should own one of these programs and get away from the primitive DOS disk management tools!

More thoughts about hard drives. The trend toward cheap drives continues. Two gigs, 2.6 gigs, 3 gigs or more . . . now standard on basic mass-market computers. Such volume staggers the imagination. The discussion above points out how to use some of the surplus effectively and how to conserve space as well. But that is not all there is to it. Perhaps the next most efficient thing you can do is export your Windows swap file to another drive. This can be done with a second internal or external drive and is a simple task but has a profound impact on the organization of your drives and the speed with which Windows functions.

The change is not difficult to make in Win95 if you have the second drive available. Go to System Properties in the Control Panel and click the Performance panel. Then click Virtual Memory. (This, in old-fashioned terms is the swap file. I must apologize to MS for suggesting that Win95 uses a swap file). Tell Win95 that you wish to manage your own file size by clicking the second option. You can then choose a different hard drive. Let the file size setting on that drive be expansive. If it shows that 150 Megs is available, set the file settings at "0" minimum and "150" maximum (or No Maximum). Click okay and Win95 will warn you and ask if you wish to continue. Click Yes. Immediately the "Let Windows manage your swap file" option is highlighted. Worry not. Note that your new disk drive destination is shown in the dimmed portion of the window. If it isn't repeat the process.

Then, before you do anything else, optimize both your drives with Norton's Speedisk, or any other similar program of your choice. There will be a persistent gain in the performance of Win95. And continue to defrag your drives regularly because that helps as well. The optimization process will take far less time than before simply because there will be far fewer screwed up clusters.

Backup. Finally, there is the age-old question of back up. Tape? Optical? Zip? Or some other newfangled device? Nada. I use hard drives for this critical task. I have two needs. First, I want a mirror of my "C" drive on another local drive. You know, if the drives goes belly up, I want to be able to switch the "D" drive to the boot position and go on about my business. In addition, though, I need to carry the same mirror to house number two when late Spring arrives. You can't do that with an internal drive!

Here's how it works at this QTH. First, using Drag and File Gold (a highly recommended 32 bit shareware file manager for Win95 that is widely available, and a tremendous bargain. Be sure to register!!), I click the "C" drive icon and tell the program, the first time around, to copy everything, including sub-directories to drive "D." In less than five minutes 500-plus Megs moves from one drive to the other. Then, I repeat the process to drive "E." This is a one gig external SCSI drive that I can pack away in my brief case and take with me whenever I wish.

Every day, I back up the critical files to both drives in less than 30 seconds. Once a week I back up the full disk to both, but by clicking the "New or updated files only" box, the time required is cut to perhaps one minute per drive. This beats the heck out of any other form of backup. The data is there, instantly available. Just the other day, a newly installed program corrupted the ver.dll file. Within seconds, I replaced it from the other drive and went on about my business. Try that with a tape drive! Even if my primary computer blows up, the external SCSI drive backup can be attached to any other SCSI chain—and I am back in business instantly! Very comforting.

One word of advice: before the daily or weekly backup, dump the Recycle Bin on your Win95 desktop. There is no point in transferring trash. Hi!

Examine the costs and convenience and I think you will agree that hard drives are the cheapest and perhaps the best way to back up even the most complex system. Try it, you'll like it.