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[Nils Kassube]

Steven Vollom wrote:
> The only part I am not completely confident in doing is to set up the
> OS and applications so that when data is saved it always
> automatically goes to the storage partitions.  I don't want the boot
> partition to contain any important savable data that can be placed on
> drives that are not subject to application crashes and loss of data. 

With a separate home partition all your applications will save the data 
on that partition because they put the data somewhere in your home 
directory (unless you tell them something different). So there is no 
extra work necessary.

> May I ask this?  I have never actually lost data due to a broken HDD.
>  Are there any built-in warning mechanisms within HDD's that let you
> know when they are about worn out?

Some disks have the S.M.A.R.T. monitoring festure [1], but I wouldn't 
rely on it.

> Do they fail, or break, without
> warning?  

You never know before if it will fail. Some disks show errors before 
failure but it isn't necessarily so. Therefore it is always good to have 
backups.

> How much of a concern should that be?  In 20+ years, I have
> never had one break.  I have always just replaced them with bigger
> drives.

Same here, more or less. In ~20 years I had just one disk with problems. 
It was from a known to be bad series of Fujitsu disks. The electronics 
was faulty after about 2.5 years of operation (but it is working again 
now and I still use it for tests).

> I can never be really sure, but I think this may be the last
> expansion I will ever need for data, so wearing out the drives or
> actual physical failure are what I am facing now.

You will certainly need bigger disks in the future. When I started 
playing with Linux, my 170MB disk was quite big. Nowadays Kubuntu 
probably wouldn't even run with 170MB of RAM, let alone disk space. 
Think about it, who would have thought about storing many movies on a PC 
10 years ago? There will always be new use cases of more and more disk 
space.


Nils

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.>