Sorry, I know this is getting old, but I am worried about some things lately and don't really know how to fix it. For those that followed my building of the two systems recently some of this may ring a bell.

I had several hard drives available to me, and in my office computer I have a 256GB SSD drive and a 3TB 7200RPM hard drive.

In the other build, or really "rebuild", I ended up having two SSD's available (one 128GB and the other 256GB) as well as two 1TB 7200RPM hard drives.

When I was building it we discussed here the various RAID settings that would help protect me, but I ended up not using RAID at all because I just didn't understand how to make it work. It seemed to require making diskettes and doing something in BIOS as well as some other things and there was no way I would ever feel comfortable doing that.

So, I've got these two computers up and running with the hard drives listed above, and both are using an SSD as the boot drive with the operating system on it. And if I'm understanding what I'm reading, SSD's have a habit of failing rather quickly compared to the rotating drives. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they have a shorter life span???).

So, of course, I'm worried about my two rigs.

Can a person just flat out COPY *.* from the C drive to one of the other drives, and then if the SSD fails, merely copy that back to a new hard drive and things will work like always?? Would I need to ensure a replacement drive was the same type and size (SSD, 256GB) or not? If copy *.* doesn't work, is there some way for me to make a copy of my root system hard drive so that a drive failure doesn't result in starting over from scratch and instead results in starting over from the last save?? I just don't know how to back up the entire C drive.

Can anyone help me?? Very sorry for the ignorance, but FWIW I try to keep learning.

There is a difference, but it doesn't have any practical relevance in your usage scenario.

Sectors in an SSD will "wear out" sooner than those in a HD, but your hardware will probably be outdated (and you'll switch it for better parts) before this happens. This issue was a concern when SSD was a very new technology, but SSD technology has advanced to a point where it simply isn't an important difference in normal usage scenarios.

In short, I think you're worrying too much.

A worn out sector can't be used any more, but the system can usually compensate (no matter which type of drive you're using) by simply using other sectors that are still intact. If your drive (again, no matter which type) starts to get unusable sectors, you should stop using it for important data (like your operating system), though it can still continue to work for a long time.

You _can_ simply copy over stuff from one drive to another as long as it's just data, as long as you make sure that the new drive gets the same drive letter and directory structure that the old one had. You _can't_ do that that easily with system drives. There are ways to copy or clone system drives - the better ones require some software, and it depends on that software whether or not it can adjust to different drive types and sizes.

Personally, I would just reinstall the OS in such a case though. It doesn't hurt to do that from time to time, especially Windows collects a lot of junk over time. And if you keep your OS and user data separate, you won't lose your data.

Thank you very much. For the most part I do keep them separate (OS and DATA) but being an SSD, I have used it to install a couple of games just to be sure hard drive speed wouldn't be an issue. And IIRC some programs were put there.

I do see what you mean by installing the OS over though. I've been told that before but forgot. And I even saw this first hand as I would do this often on an older computer. It would seem make it run more efficiently. That was Windows 95 or 98 though (lol, long time ago).

I really appreciate your advice and now will just simply plan on reinstalling when something happens. (Notice the "when" and not "if")

Thank you very much for your thoughtful and helpful reply.

This place is awesome.

What you want is an image based backup of the OS drive. Typically this is done after a fresh Windows install, install any necessary drivers and assorted, not too mention large number of, Windows updates. You then make an image of that drive using clonezilla, ghost, acronis, etc. This does a few things including keeping the size of the image down and has you start from effectively a clean Windows install. It's also much faster than installing from scratch. Yet, Windows is still Windows. ;)