Two 500 Gig. Western Digital(s)

[Lawreston]

This is to avoid sponging off Dave Siciliano's Got my1.5 Terabyte thread.

A year or so ago Best Buy had a good sale on the Western digital 500 Gig.hard drives. The deal was attractive enough that I bought two of them. Only one is in (external) use; the other is still in the box. The "in use" still has 300+ Gig unused. My internal HD is 250 Gig.

Question: If I take the other unit out of the box can I direct it to take, primarily, my DistinctiveViews.Printroom.com related files? Every one of my initial images can vary from 16 to 23 MB. By the time I do post processing and create other images from the originals the files grow. Other than the collection of images there are templates for my greeting card layouts; a master for every greeting card's back side graphics; and the growing line of postcards. Said graphics are done on Pagemaker*, and it can chew up some space.

Or could I make one of the 500 units be my main drive and use the 2nd 500 as backup? As y'all can see, I'm a button pusher, not an IT person. Any suggestions? Rather than tie up this space, perhaps e-mail to me would be better for advisories lawrestonhughes.net. (Y'all know where to put the @)

HR

 

[gismo]

This is to avoid sponging off Dave Siciliano's Got my1.5 Terabyte thread.

A year or so ago Best Buy had a good sale on the Western digital 500 Gig.hard drives. The deal was attractive enough that I bought two of them. Only one is in (external) use; the other is still in the box. The "in use" still has 300+ Gig unused. My internal HD is 250 Gig.

Question: If I take the other unit out of the box can I direct it to take, primarily, my DistinctiveViews.Printroom.com related files? Every one of my initial images can vary from 16 to 23 MB. By the time I do post processing and create other images from the originals the files grow. Other than the collection of images there are templates for my greeting card layouts; a master for every greeting card's back side graphics; and the growing line of postcards. Said graphics are done on Pagemaker*, and it can chew up some space.

You can't "direct" a drive to "take" files. It's quite likely you could change your preferences for the DistinctiveViews app (or most any other app) so that the default location for files is in a folder on the second drive but you'd have to figure out how to do that using the documentation for the app. You could also move the existing files on your original hard drive to the new one using file explorer.

Or

could I make one of the 500 units be my main drive and use the 2nd 500 as backup? As y'all can see, I'm a button pusher, not an IT person. Any suggestions? Rather than tie up this space, perhaps e-mail to me would be better for advisories lawrestonhughes.net. (Y'all know where to put the @)

HR

That's possible but somewhat complicated for a "button pusher". You'd have to clone the existing drive onto one of the 500 GB drives (fairly easy with apps like Acronis) or re-install the operating system and everything else (PITA).