What is the best SATA solution to maintain a clone of a hard drive? I currently have a 20 gig hard drive and would like to upgrade to a larger SATA drive. I would also like to maintain an imaged or cloned copy of my main hard drive on another partition or separate drive. I am considering getting two identical 80 Gb SATA drives. Each drive could contain 3 partitions. The first drive would house 3 partitions (OS, programs, mp3/images) and the second drive would contain a cloned/image of each partition. This way, I could easily create an image of each partition. I will be using Nortan Ghost 2002 and would like to back-up every week or so. I am mainly concerned about software conflicts, bad drivers, or doing something stupid to my OS. My questions are: 1. Will Ghost 2002 work with SATA? An article in the May Maximum PC said they had problems with 865GBF SATA chipset and Ghost 2003 but got it to work with using a Silicon Image 3112 PCI SATA controller. My motherboard uses an NForce2 and an integrated Silicon Image 3112 PCI SATA chip. 2. What other back-up options are out there? Would I be better served with one large SATA drive? 3. What is a good size for the OS partition? 10GB? My system is: Athlon XP 3200 GA-7NNXP 512 Mb PC3200 Kingston GeForce4 4600 WinXP SP1 Thanks for the advice.

Why not use a RAID array. If you use disk mirroring you automatically write to two or more drives. You have SATA RAID 0/1 on your MB. You want to use RAID 1. See this site for a defination of RAID. http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html

OthHill, Good idea, I thought about RAID; however, I mainly concerned about me doing something to the system to mess it up. With RAID 1, any mistake I made would be automatically duplicated on the back-up.

Well good intentions aren't always followed through. I would hate to see you came beack here asking how you can recover data from a dead drive. If you "make a mistake" you either correct it or it gets copied to the clone drive anyway. If you correct it the mirrored drive also gets corrected.