SSDs, HDDs and RAMdrives

ignatzatsonic · 24 Apr 2014

BJB said:

a corrupt flash drive somehow caused loss of my data partitions, and this in turn caused both Acronis and Reflect to fail to restore a bootable system partition

That interests me.

Can you provide details on why the loss of a data partition would cause Acronis and Macrium to fail to restore?

I assume the image files were not stored on the lost data partition. Or were they? In which case, I do understand.

BJB · 24 Apr 2014

ignatzatsonic said:

BJB said:

a corrupt flash drive somehow caused loss of my data partitions, and this in turn caused both Acronis and Reflect to fail to restore a bootable system partition

That interests me.

Can you provide details on why the loss of a data partition would cause Acronis and Macrium to fail to restore?

I assume the image files were not stored on the lost data partition. Or were they? In which case, I do understand.

Only wish I could! For years I always ignored the regular advice on Acronis to image the entire drive rather than just the OS partition but this incident, or shock rather, has me wondering just how safe system only images really are, and it's one of the reasons I decided it was time to get a small SSD system so no partitioning of the OS drive would be necessary. And no, the images were not on the same drive of course.

BJB · 25 Apr 2014

ignatzatsonic said:

BJB said:

a corrupt flash drive somehow caused loss of my data partitions, and this in turn caused both Acronis and Reflect to fail to restore a bootable system partition

That interests me.

Can you provide details on why the loss of a data partition would cause Acronis and Macrium to fail to restore?

I didn't explain this properly at all so I'll have another go. It seems that in messing around trying to get this flash to format, somehow my HDD partition table got damaged and the extended logical partition holding my data partitions just disappeared. I didn't know that this had happened until I rebooted, when my user profile failed to load after login. I managed to recover the lost partitions with Partition Wizard but it still would not boot to my desktop so I had little option but to restore my last Win 7 system image, first with Acronis and then with Reflect. Both booted OK but failed to load my desktop so I had to assume that somehow the registry links that associate your user profile with with your initial login were no longer valid.

My new machine had arrived meantime so I spent a day or two on that while debating what to do about the Medion. I decided to have one last go at recovery before reinstalling 7 and went back to a two month old Acronis image more in hope than expectation and bingo - it booted straight to my desktop.

So it was that salutary experience that convinced me that moving your user profile to another drive was not on unless you intend including both drives in your images, which I don't want to do, but the Win 7 Libraries offer a simple solution to the problem.

Sorry for misleading you.

jimbo45 · 25 Apr 2014

Hi there
IMO the BEST place for paging and the OS itself IS the SSD - user data doesn't need to be accessed that quickly. Things like Photoshop scratch files do incredibly well on SSD's.

I'd just sling the whole OS on to the SSD and any other data where you see a lot of accesses (but no user data files like music / video).

Another good use for SSD's is to put Virtual Machines on them if you run those too.

Prices are coming right down -- I see the new 1TB drive is getting to something "almost" affordable !!!

In a few years HDD's will probably be obsolete too. !!!

Cheers
jimbo