Windows 7 Improving Performance with a Second Internal WD Caviar Black Hard Drive

Nice to hear of a good experience. Not all news is bad news eh! Also good to hear you're using Acronis - wouldn't run a pc without it.

I have up to date Images using Acronis on both of our laptops. In fact I just made new Images earlier this week, although I should create even newer Images since the Tuesday patch cycle happened after my last Image, Darn. Oh well.

Hi

I've had two internal drives in my computers for a long time.
I always back up my C:\ drive to it, lets my update it quickly and it's always available if I have to restore.

I also back them both up to external drives, this can be kind of a problem because if I back up my whole D:\ drive it includes the back up of the C:\ drive which is unnecessary and makes the backup file larger then it needs to be.

I haven't looked at whether there is a way to exclude it using Acronis, I'll look at that the next time I create a backup of D:\.

Mike

Old topic, but new experience.

I've posted many times that the quickest backup with any backup program is to the second partition of the main drive.
Next, would be backing up to another internal drive.
Next, would be to any USB device, since USB in just naturally slow.
The slowest but the most reliable, over time, would be a backup to DVD.

A great speed regulator that most guys never think of is the CPU itself.
The CPU is the engine that moves data through the system. If it's bogged down by Services and TSR's running in the
background, then the backup, done from within Windows will be slowed down. If a backup absolutely MUST be done
from within windows, doing it in SAFE mode would eliminate a lot of the interference from running programs and services.

That's just one of many reasons why I will never do any backup from within Windows.
I only run my backup from a DOS boot disk, where windows is totally out of the picture and all the files on C: are closed.

Next, to be considered, is just what are you backing up? Are you backing up temp files, Temporary Internet files, cookies,
backup ( .bak ) files? And what about the Hiberfil.sys and Pagefile ???
The list just goes on and on and pretty soon your backup is twice the size it needs to be.

To save space and time in making my own backups, I remove all of the above JUNK before doing my backups.
I actually lessen the number of files going into my backup by over 4 gig's.
I can backup my cleaned up C: drive, using Ghost, run in DOS, in about 8 minutes. An integrity CHECK takes even less time
and a restore takes about 10 minutes. So in less than 30 minutes, if I don't dawdle too much, I can do my Backup, Check, and Restore. It's something I try to do at least once every week, or after I install updates to programs, like I've done this week.
Excuse me, while I get out of here and do another Ghost backup.

Happy Holidays Everyone!
😎