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Unallocated Space - Is It Inaccessible Without a "Letter"?
I just partitioned and formatted "Disk 2" or "Drive K: on my system. While Drive Management was opened, I noticed that each of the other disks, 0, 1, and 3, all have Unallocated Space. For 0 and 3 the space is 'insignificant' in today's terms, 3 Mb and 9Mb respectively, but for disk 1 the amount is 130.42 Gb.
I don't believe I did this deliberately. Disks 1 and 3 were once part of a RAID1 created under Intel's Rapid Storage Technology. Since 1 was larger than 3 (640 Gb vs 500 Gb in nominal terms) does this perhaps explain what I am seeing?
On Tuesday I should take delivery of a 1 Tb WD Caviar black SATA drive. I will use this as my primary data drive and once I am comfortable that everything is where it should be I will reformat 1 and 3 to use as devices for backup storage. Disk 1 is about 50% full (and could stand some 'housekeeping'.) CrystalDiskInfo 6.1.14 reports Power On Hours : 18929 hours and Power On Count : 1896 count for this drive. For Disk 3 the values are Power On Hours : 28065 hours and Power On Count : 2729 count.
Is it reasonable to trust them for a while yet or should they each be given a 'gold watch' and retired?
Am I correct that each time Windows 7 'hibernates' I save in terms of "Power on Hours" but I accumulate another "power on Count?" Is there reliable evidence that this is a better strategy for prolonging HDD life than a single, overnight shutdown. The system would otherwise normally run a 16 - 18 hour day, 7 days a week.
thanks,
baumgrenze