Strategies after buying new hard drive

Logan Rathbone logan.rathbone-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
Tue Dec 14 00:01:08 UTC 2004


On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 17:52:12 -0500
Andrew Hammond <ahammond-swQf4SbcV9C7WVzo/KQ3Mw at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> 4GB commodity disk? That's gotta be about 6 years old, right? Guaranteed 
> any new disk (except laptop gear, which I know almost nothing about) 
> will seek faster. It's almost guaranteed to die in the next year or two 
> anyway. Personally, I'd throw the 4GB in the trash. Or crack it open and 
> make some ninja frisbees.
> 
Yes, it is, almost exactly, 6 years old!  I think the general consensus here is either to get rid of the disk entirely, or to use it for minimal purposes.  I'll probably do the former, even though it has served me well for the past 6 years and hasn't caused any problems.  Oh well, I'll always remember it!

> <snip>
> 
> If you haven't picked your new drive, I'd suggest a WD Raptor (assuming 
> that you've got good power and cooling in your chassis, obviously). Last 
> I checked (about 7 months ago), they had the best seek times. Which is 
> not a big surprise since they based on mid-range SCSI disks with a SATA 
> interface. They're also 10kRPM disks, so sequential reads and writes can 
> really get some value out of that SATA interface. They aren't 
> particularly cheap however.

That sounds a little too expensive and high-end for my purposes :-O

I'm not running a high performance server or anything, and I haven't found my IDE 4 GB hard drive's speed to be intolerable.  I haven't found it that much different from my 20 GBer.  So I guess I'm not much of a speed-sensitive person.  I don't have a SATA or SCSI controller, and I don't really know much about them.  I think I'll just get a simple IDE drive unless you folks can give me a compelling reason not to!  :-P

I think I'll just leave Windows on the 20 GB hard drive; it doesn't need any more space than it already has!  Moving the Linux data to another disk is a trivial task and one that I'm fairly comfortable with.  I imagine I'd have to reinstall GRUB though, unless things work out naturally -- right now (using unix, not grub, terminology) /dev/hda is the 4 GBer and hdb is the 20 GBer.  If I insert the new drive, copy everything from the 4 GB to the new one, turn the computer off, take out the 4 GB, put the new one in its place and turn the computer on, will it work out ok?

Thanks for the replies everyone, I really appreciate it!
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