Gosh Darn, I’m Worth It

Posted on February 25, 2007 2 Comments

The home server flamed out last week eating its own boot and apps drive. I’ve used that as the starting point of simplifying the home network. No more domain controllers, simple profiles and sharing. My home PC will host the shared printer, music library and such.

However, the server’s death left a (relatively) large gap in the amount of shared storage available to us. Switching from domain based user profiles to non-domain is a pain in the keister and has caused some annoyances. I’ve decided that all the home machines are going to get reloads over the next month or two.

WD Drive You can see me lining up the rationalization for a new hard drive for my PC right? And heck, if a guy’s going to buy a new drive, maybe the guy should take advantage of newer technology? My trusty old Asus mobo supports SATA and I’ve never even had a drive to use it!

I do now. I went for speed over size and picked up a Western Digital Raptor this afternoon. 10,000 RPM. SATA. 16MB cache {insert Tim Allen grunts here}.

Ran into a small snag: Since my boot drive is SATA, I needed to give the XP installer a floppy with drivers (ugh). It wouldn’t see my trusty USB floppy drive so I had to scavenge up a working floppy drive/cable from some relics in the garage. The floppy drive has 1995 stamped on it…

But hey, if Atwood and Hanselman say this is a good idea, who am I to argue?!? Well, I’ll disagree with Hanselman’s rush to Vista…

I’m going to load OS and apps on it to keep everything zippy. The former boot drive is another Western Digital, the once hot 80GB Caviar JB and will now be the data drive. It’ll also house “My Documents” just to isolate things a bit.

It’s a bit silly to put that drive in a machine sporting an AMD 2500+ (barton core), 1GB of RAM and a mighty GForce 6800 GT video card, but hey — I’ll just upgrade one step at a time. Besides, how much horsepower does it take to crank out blog posts and build simple little apps and plugins?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a machine to set up.

Tags: hard-drive, raptor, SATA, server, storage, Western-Digital