How do you setup your hard-drive configuration so you can re-install LMCE without erasing your media? e.g. If I have 2 hard-drives, 500 GB each, am I required to reserve ALL of one drive for LMCE (this is overkill in terms of space needed)? I was thinking of partitioning the first drive to 100 & 400 GB partitions and use the 400 GB partition for recording TV etc. Is 100 GB sufficient for LMCE for the long term? Will re-install of the next LMCE version erase my 400 GB partition TV recordings? What about the other 500 GB hard-drive? Do I need to unplug it when re-installing LMCE to prevent erasing my media? I am asking this because I know I will end up re-installing LMCE atleast 2 - 3 times before it is 'finalized'.
I would use an old IDE drive for the core install, and use those 500GB disks for a RAID. RAID1 will use 50% of the drive for security, while RAID5 uses only one drive. You will need a third disk for 1TB RAID5 but your data will then be protected. Should one disk fail all data is still there, you could even add a fourth disk and get 1.5TB of protected data.