How to do hard drives?

[smilodon]

Thinking about TL's recent HDD reliability post I've been musing about my own set up. For that reason this is a bit of a 'very specific to me' post but any thoughts or advice would be appreciated.

My PC is most importantly used for work and then gaming; general PC stuff. Work requires the main 1 Tb HDD to hold Windows 8.1, Adobe products and a load of photographs. The photographs are backed up to an external 500Gb HDD. Older photography sits on sets of two external HDD's. The latest pair are connected to the PC, older pairs are in a box in the corner.

My concern is that should my main HDD fail I'll be out of action until I can replace it and completely reinstall my OS, Adobe apps and photographs. This could take a few days which I sometimes can't afford to take. No Pc = no work = sad client. I'm considering installing a second internal 1Tb HDD and 'mirroring/cloning whatever' my entire main HDD to it. I'll then run nightly backups to the new internal HDD The idea is that should the main unit fail I can swap over a few cables and be up and running on the second HDD straight away. Alternatively I could install a SSD and run Windows and Adobe from it. I'm not sure which is the better option? As a business I'm looking to not spend money where I don't need to and I already have a second HDD in a cupboard ready to go. I'm looking for simplicity so I'm not sure I need to raid the two internal HDD's and have no real idea how to even do it.

I think my question is exactly how reliable is an SSD over a HDD. Sooner or later the existing HDD will fail and while my data is safe I will suffer downtime getting back up and running. A cloned HDD would be a few minutes to fix. An SSD would be as time costly as replacing a HDD. Can I clone an SSD to a HDD and have the best of both worlds. Or do I have to clone SSD to SSD?

[Chaosphere]

To be honest I think any way of cloning an Os drive will be more hassle than it is worth, especially if you have to do it every day. In addition to the extra effort and time, you also have to think that extra cloning adds 60 plus Gb of use to both HDDs involved every day - 60gb removed from drive B, then 60 copied from drive A, and finally written again onto drive B - that is a lot of data being moved about and to me would only seem to risk prematurely 'aging' the drive, taking it closer to its Gb limit before death, so to speak.

Instead I would suggest having 2 USB sticks, one with a clean OS on it and another with the most essential apps. These sit in your draw ready for doomsday. Should the worse happen, you can set up a clean install and get light room and photoshop installed within an hour, I have done this many times myself, it really doesn't take long at all if you have everything ready to go in the first place.

Edit - Oh and sorry I see I didn't answer the last question! I'm not entirely sure which is more reliable long term. My money would be on SSD, especially one from a reliable name (Samsung, intel). Although I wouldn't really lose sleep over this issue if I were you. Regular backups of photos and a system I have described above will minimise hassle when, inevitably, either your main hdd or ssd fails. If I were you, I would stick with the hdd you have until it dies, and then replace it with a new ssd. This saves money. Of course, if you simply want to upgrade sooner, ssds have added benefits of better performance and you can pick up decent sized drives for good prices now, just depends if you want to spend the cash!

[Penfold]

My 'data' drive, like yours, runs to several hundred GB's.

I have that running in RAID so if one drive fails, the PC will just switch to the mirror drive and carry on. Admittedly this isn't the C: OS drive for which I have a smaller SSD but that could be done as well I suppose.

The advantage is that it's a constant backup and saves you having to remember to back it up as you go.

I use Acronis for the C Drive so if it pops I can just boot into across using rescue media then install the op system straight back on.

I also have a 1TB dropbox account (£7.99 per month) which is backing up constantly. Not only does this give added insurance in case of a fire of theft but it's set and forget and also easily accessible from anywhere.

[Gorion]

I have read about some using a nas for backup, then backing up the mass onto an hdd.

You could also clone a fresh system with all your applications ready, then restore it and as whatever needs adding of it hits the fan.  For backups you should go incremental as it only backsup the stuff which have changed since the last backup.

Try to limit the use of raid especially for backup jobs, as when you come to a situation where you have to change a drive, it is very picky and annoying. Teaelle had this problem if i remember right.

[suicidal_monkey]

This may be relevant to your decision on what is more convenient/speedy...
http://xkcd.com/1205/