RAID-1: Defrag and Backup

I'm having a new system built with two 150GB 10K rpm drives for system/programs and two 500GB 7.2K rpm drives for data. The two 150's will be in a RAID-1 (SATA) configuration, and the two 500's (also SATA) will also be RAID-1. It will be a XP/Pro system.

(1) What software do I use to backup these two arrays to an external USB-2 disk drive?

(2) What software do I use for defragging the drives.

:confused

 

Depends. If you want to image your system partition, maintaining your Windows installation and patches, drivers and applications, you need an imaging program such as Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image.

If you're only worried about your data, pictures, music, movies, etc... just use xcopy. That's how I backup my files. Since I keep drivers and install files for my programs, I don't worry about imaging the system partition.

defrag.exe will do the job just fine.