Setting up hard drives

I think most here recommend Macrium or Acronis (a free version of Acronis is available to owners of Western Digital drives). See links in our Freeware DB.

Other possibilities are available in this Article.

Thanks as usual!!!

For the best, buy new drives en hold the old once for BU. Format the drives first ( by a friend who have XP = full format )? The other Q, i used in the past S.M.A.R.T. software, but i put it out of my system, because are you busy with your hobby or are you looking for your HDD's, on a other "good" disk slipstream the OS and office with the latest SP's for BU, i did this from 95osr2 -98se-XPpro-and now for 1°7-HPX64_2°7-ProX64. If you have WD- HDD's ACRONIS is free and OK, but there alternativs? ( BE_DU ) Best Regards and good luck

If you mean the low level formatting, that isn't really recommended for newer drives and a standard format is available in all windows versions including W7.
And I'm not sure I understand what you mean here...

SMART technology is implemented on all major manufacturers hard drives any more, though it is not standardized as to what exactly that means. It is just one more tool to help warn you of a potential hard drive failure.

The slip-streamed OS and office DVDs would be really handy if you need to reinstall but if you actually maintain a back-up image of your system then you shouldn't ever need the DVDs.

So I'm not sure why you would want hard drives without SMART simply because you slip-stream? I am wondering if you are confusing SMART with RAID 1?

SMART is simply an early warning system for the hard drive and has nothing to do with back-ups whereas RAID 1 would maintain duplicate HDs in case of the failure of one. I would say RAID 1 is overkill for a home computer and regular back-ups would be more suitable. But I would not avoid/disable SMART technology even if you could find harddrives without it.

SMART is not raid 1, hehe, try different SMART-software; the one say OK, the second: health 80 %, the third something different. Have you something to win with SMART software ? And i don't mean a low level format, because out off the factory the are low formatted, What a discussion, man. Regards