How did you synchronize 2 hard drives?

Answer 1

It is possbile under a program called RAID. Do some research on it, cause there is RAID 0, RAID 1, etc. But basically your hard drive is set up to write data to both hard drives at the same time. Or, you could make an exact copy of your hard drive using the program from Ghost, and copy it on the second hard drive.

Answer 2

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. The principle behind RAID is primarily fault tolerance, though certain RAID levels also give speed increases.

The common RAID levels are 1 and 5. RAID 0 is not considered a true RAID level because there is no redundancy and thus no fault tolerance. RAID 0 is only data striping. This means that the data is written in pieces across the various drives in the array (with a minimum of two drives) and this gives the array the ability to find the parts of the data faster than if it were read off a single drive piece by piece. Thus, it leads to a performance increase but at the expense of potentially losing all data if a single drive in the array fails. Another advantage to this is that the full capacity of all drives is available for data storage. However, the lack of fault tolerance outweighs the advantages, so professionals generally do not install it.

RAID 1 is also known as mirroring. In this case, there are at least two drives (but can be more provided that it is done in pairs such as 4, 6, etc.). This means that when data is written to the array, it actually is written to both drives (or both sets of drives). This way, if one part of the mirror goes bad, the other part takes over and the data is still served as if nothing is wrong. When the failed drive has been replaced, the data that should be on it is rebuilt from the good copy of the drive and there is no loss of data or up time. The total storage capacity of RAID 1 is half the total of all the drives in the array.

RAID 5 is known as data striping with parity. This is essentially RAID 0 but with fault tolerance. This lRAID level requires a minimum of three drives but can be as many as the RAID array can handle. How it works is that, just like with RAID 0, the data is spread across the drives except that there is one drive that is used for parity check information. Which drive has the parity information varies as the stripe is distributed between all the drives. This means that the full capacity of the array is the capacity of the drives in the array minus one.

There is also RAID 6 which is RAID 5 but with double parity. This allows for the potential failure of two drives instead of just one. The advantages of RAID 5 are the same for RAID 6. The total capacity of the array is the total of all drives minus two, however, since two drives are used for parity information.

The final commonly referenced level is RAID 10, which is technically what is referred to as a Nested RAID and is properly written as RAID 1 + 0. This is a mirrored array that is also striped. Essentially, it is giving fault tolerance to the RAID 0 concept. The total capacity of the array is the same as RAID 1: half of the total of the drives in the array.

So, how does one synchronize two (or more) drives? It can be accomplished through the various RAID levels (other than 0) as I have just described if you are talking about having the drives work in unison for improved performance and/or fault tolerance. This requires not only the drives and the desire to set up a RAID array, though, but also requires the hardware necessary to set it up, such as a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, a motherboard that has RAID capability integrated into its BIOS, or a RAID controller to which the drives are attached inside the computer.

Now, if you are wanting to know how to get two hard drives to be exact copies of each other, then as Rtrahan said, you could use a drive cloning software such as Norton Ghost. However, I have found that the utility called EaseUS Disk Copy works much better and more quickly. You can find it at http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/.

Finally, if you are talking about synchronizing two folders such as at work and at home, then using software such as Dropbox can assist you with that. Essentially you install the software on both machines and log into your account on both, then just start dropping whatever files into the folders that you wish to have duplicated on the opposite machine. Each time you add or modify a file at one end, it is added or modified at the other end. This makes continuing your work at home after leaving the office for the day very easy.

I hope all this helps. If you have another issue that has not yet been covered or continuing questions about any of this, drop me a line and let me know. I am glad to assist.