OT: Computer upgrade advice

[narf poit chez BOOM]

My hard drive is getting kind of full, so I've decided to upgrade.

I'm thinking, two 500GB HD's, one main one, one for backing up the other one, and XP Pro (Because I only have Home edition).

I don't intend to buy all this at once. Anyway, recommendations? Comments? Would it be better to wait for prices to go down?

[Fyron]

How will XP Pro help with a full drive? If you decide to get XP Pro, make sure to order a OEM version, rather than waste a ton of money on a retail box. There is over 100% difference in price between them..

If you want to use the second drive as a backup, look into setting up a RAID 1 array with them (if your motherboard can support it, anyways). All data will be automatically mirrored to both drives, as it is written. That way, if one drive fails, all of your data is still on the other. You also get some minor read I/O performance gain.

(naturally a RAID 5 array would be much better, but you need at least 3 hdds to set one up)

[Combat Wombat]

backup drives are for suckers

[narf poit chez BOOM]

@Fyron: Raid 1 looks about right. Can a raid array be set up after data has been written to the drive, or do both HD need to be bought and added at the same time?

@CW: Your post is lacking in information.

Thanks for the input.

[Raapys]

You need identical and clean drives to set up a raid array, from what I know. You also need a raid controller.

I've to agree with CW; backup drives are rather unncessary for home/personal use computers, unless you're storing very important documents. I've never once actually had a drive fail on me, this with 4 desktop PC's and 6 laptops over a period of 10-12'ish years.

The cheapest 500gb drives seems to be at around 100-125$, both internal and external, I believe. Don't have much experience with external drives myself though, so I'm unsure how reliable they are.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Yeah, but 'cheapest' doesn't inspire confidence in the workmanship.

[Fyron]

The workmanship from Seagate, Maxtor (now part of Seagate), Western Digital, Hitachi, and the few others that make drives is more or less identical. Which one is cheaper for you is largely dependent on which price levels the retailers have decided to sell them.

External hdds are a huge waste of money; its exactly the same hardware as an internal drive, just with different casing. They usually cost 1.5-2x as much... A cheap $20 aluminum enclosure will turn any internal drive into an external one. They go on sale rather frequently.. Just don't buy the ones that are cheap plastic enclosures; the slim, fanless aluminum ones that hug the drive and act as a heat sink are all you need.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Ok, thanks.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

They want $200 for 500GB hard drives here. Online it is!

How do I tell what kind of connector my motherboard has?

This one looks good. Also, it looks like only, too.

Or the competition.

[Will]

narf poit chez BOOM said:
They want $200 for 500GB hard drives here. Online it is!

How do I tell what kind of connector my motherboard has?

Well, if you're not sure what you're looking for, it can be a little difficult to see the connector types. The easiest is if you have IDE connectors open. With these you will see a plastic box with two rows of pins sticking up. If you have a floppy drive, it's plugged into a similar socket (except it has fewer pins... I believe it's 2x20 for IDE, and 2x16 for floppy drives; IDE will have a pin "missing" somewhere near the middle, floppy will have two missing toward the end). SATA connectors are a little harder to spot. Usually there will be a piece of plastic about the width of your thumb sticking up with little gold contacts rising vertically on one side. There is probably a little plastic hook next to the part with the gold contacts to seat the plug properly. In either case, you will probably see "IDE" or "SATA" written on the mainboard somewhere close to it. Also, I don't know of a way to tell SATA and SATA II connectors apart without going into manuals or BIOS or something, but if you have an SATA II drive it will work on a regular SATA connector, so might as well go for the SATA II one.

Also, be aware that if you are doing a RAID-1 setup, a lot of RAID drivers will barf if you do not give them "identical" drives. So if you have a Maxtor 500GB and a Seagate 500GB, some RAID drivers will refuse to work. If your board says anything about "JBOD" though, you can set up that instead, since it lifts the identical requirement.

--edit: Also, "Ultra ATA" == "IDE". A little confusing, I have no idea why they chose two entirely different names for the same thing.