24 February 2008

Faster or bigger...? (safe for work!)

In the last few months, I've been living in fear that may laptop's HDD would die on me; it's now more than three years old, and has lived through pretty rough times (e.g. 14 months of Gentoo, and quite a few nights compiling KDE4). Half of the smartctl status codes say "Old_age" and the other half "Pre_fail"...

Last week I took a long-overdue full backup, and I'm now thinking about buying a spare replacement as soon as I can, before ATA-100 (also known as PATA or good ol'IDE) models disappear from the market, now dominated by SATA. My choice seems limited to two models:

  1. 100Gb 7200rpm, which is exactly what I have now, or...
  2. a more capable but slower 250Gb 5400rpm
In my experience, Linux likes that extra kick from the HDD much more than Windows, but recently I've had to fight with my filesystem for every spare Gb so I'd really fancy soem extra space. I would be happy to do with something in between (say, 160 or 200Gb 7200rpm), but I can't find anything of that sort anymore. For some reason, it seems like one has to choose between size and speed. What should I do?

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3 comments:

  1. Unknown24/2/08 16:46

    What would you use that extra space for? Would it be feasible to consider an external HD for space needs, and the faster HD for the laptop?

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  2. toyg24/2/08 21:14

    I already have one big external HD. It's impractical to have yet another "technobrick" hanging around with its multitude of cables, so I take it out only for backups.
    At the moment, I probably pay the price for a slightly wasteful partitioning scheme on this laptop, that allowed me lots of flexibility through the years. I'd really like to have more or less the same I have now, with just a bit more space...

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  3. Anonymous26/2/08 12:29

    Io di solito uso sempre HDD relativamente piccoli (60-80-100Gb) per l'OS e il resto, e poi storeggio di tutto in unità esterne/chiavette USB/CD/DVD.

    The right way, it's what u prefer.
    (Sperando di non scrivere castronerie)

    PS: Giulio, ti ho beccato su aNobii!! Per caso. Avevi una libreria simile alla mia, per alcuni aspetti. :)

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