Bad Hard Drive

[Henry Spencer]

On Thu, 6 Jan 2005, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> > Possibly so, but do you care?  If your only concern is to buy a workable
> > replacement for the old (say) 4GB drive in that firewall box, does it
> > *matter* whether the usable capacity of that $75 drive is 32GB or 80GB? 
> 
> When a solution exists to easily get the whole drive capacity, then yes
> I would care.  Nothin wrong with another local fileserver giving more
> shared storage space to the local network.

Sorry, but that's not correct.  There is a *LOT* wrong with it.  When the
machine is a firewall, you do *NOT* want to run a fileserver on it. 
Machines whose job is security should run *NOTHING* not essential to their
operation and maintenance. 

Let me put it still another way.  Okay, you've got this machine with an
aging little disk drive, and it can't take today's huge drives.  Well,
I've got a source of 32GB disk drives for you -- just small enough that
the machine will take them without complications.  They're brand new. 
They cost the same as today's low-end drives, maybe $50-75 -- that is to
say, dirt cheap -- and can be had from the same suppliers.  They've got
the same performance and the same warranty.  The only thing that's at all
special about them is that you have to put one jumper plug on them before
installing them.  Sounds like just what you wanted, right? 

Disk space is no longer so precious that wasting a bit of it, to save
yourself time and hassle, is cause for howls of anguish and a desperate
search for alternatives.

> Besides if it is a dedicated firewall, perhaps you have another machine
> you can borrow the HD from another machine for the firewall and add the
> new large drive to your main machine.

Or just buy new drives for both.  How much time and hassle is it worth
to avoid wasting $30 worth of disk space?!?

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org

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