Worth getting another hard drive?

[Dark_Angel]

Hey,

At the moment I have a 250GB drive (IDE) split in 2 partions, (100 or so for windows, the rest for whatever else) and a 120GB drive (also IDE).

The 120GB drive is pretty old/slow and the 250GB one is 16MB cache 7200RPM (so not bad).

I am pondering to get another drive though, my board is an ASUS P5N-E SLI, so I can quite easily get some sata's going, but never used a sata drive before really. I can't decide which to get for around 70 max (big as possibly obviously) or if I should just get a USB hard drive, in case I wish to take stuff around a friends house or something...

Opinions?

 

[BillytheImpaler]

I'd get a Seagate 7200.10 320 GB SATA disk. I just got another and I'm loving it.

 

[Dark_Angel]

I'd get a Seagate 7200.10 320 GB SATA disk. I just got another and I'm loving it.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-078-SE you mean that one My friend?

 

[BillytheImpaler]

Yes indeed, sir.

 

[Dark_Angel]

Yes indeed, sir.

Sorry to sound a bit of a noob, but is there anything "special" I need to do with the drive? is it just a case of enabling SATA in the BIOS (I think mine is disabled ATM) and then plugging in the hard drive and letting Windows XP find/set it up?

I am running Windows XP SP2, and I remember that on my old SP1 version of windows I had a devil of a time trying to get windows to reconize the fact the drive was over 127GB, I had to download a patch or something :/ I assume no such problems with XP SP2 and that the entire drive will be reconized so I won't have to partion it ?

Then again, maybe I should format again and then move Windows to the SATA drive, but then that seems a heck of a lot of effort when I just got windows how I like it again :/

 

[BillytheImpaler]

You won't have any trouble getting it to be recognized by Windows. Plug it in, enable SATA in your BIOS and load up Windows. When there you'll need to format it in Disk Management (I think it's called Disk Management, I'm on Linux ATM so I can't check ). The limit in the NTFS formatter has been fixed with SP2. The limit in the FAT32 formatter has not been changed.

 

[Dark_Angel]

Cool, pretty much what I thought then

So you don't think it is worth getting a External Drive then?

 

[BillytheImpaler]

I'd get this then maybe down the road get an enclosure for it that supports eSATA, Firewire (400 or 800), and USB 2.0.

 

[C64]

There's no point having an expensive drive for data raring burning extracting paring deleting etc etc i still use ide for my slave needs.