Yesterday I bought another Seagate ST3120026A hard drive.
...that's a Seagate Technologies 3-series drive (3.5 inch platters) with an unformatted capacity of 120,026 megabytes, IDE interface--for those who don't know how to read Seagate's model numbers.
(1 5p33k 73h 1337-5p33k lol!!!!!111one-dittyone...)
Friday, January 26, 2007, I made good on a plan I'd had for weeks to upgrade my computer's C drive.
In a prior entry I mentioned upgrading my D drive to a 120 GB drive, from a paltry 40 GB. And in another entry I mentioned that my computer had a 40 GB C drive.
That was wrong. My C drive was the factory original 20 GB hard drive. No wonder I always ran out of space on that thing.
What with the holidays and everything else, this was the first time I'd had enough time to go shopping for anything I did not desperately need now--to say nothing, of course, of the fact that installing a big hard drive like that takes a lot of time.
As mentioned in the entry referenced above, it takes about five, six hours to partition, format, and verify a 120 GB hard drive under Windows ME. And then it took more time to copy the data from the old drive to the new one, such that at 1:30 AM I finally buttoned the case up and restarted the computer.
...had to make the partition on the new C drive an active and bootable partition, oops...
...had to use the DOS command "SYS.COM" to set the "bootable" flag so that it would actually load the bootstrap files, *sigh*....
It's been ages since I did this kind of upgrade. The last time was in 1998 as I recall. Fortunately the technique I learned (which worked for versions of Windows up to Windows 98) also works for Windows ME. Well, WinME is basically Win98 with about 20,000 bug fixes....
The nice thing about all this is that I paid $75 for the new drive, with tax. The 120 GB drives are obsolete now that the new perpendicular recording drives are being made. The smallest 3.5 inch hard drive I saw at Best Buy today--other than this 120 GB drive--was 250 GB.
The Seagate 120 GB drive was on clearance. Its pre-clearance price had been $80; now it was $70. In the earlier entry I mentioned that I had gone to Best Buy in order to buy a 160 GB drive for $80, and instead bought a 120 GB drive for $90. Now I have bought another for $70; so in fact it all evened out, really.
My computer's IDE busses are full. I have two combo drives to read CDs and DVDs (and one is a writable drive, of course) on IDE1; IDE0 has both the hard drives.
I could, I suppose, yank the DVD-ROM drive from IDE1 and replace it with another hard drive, if I was feeling particularly adventurous. That would get me another 120 GB of storage, for a total on-line storage of 360 GB.
If I really wanted storage I could invest in a RAID card and build a drive array; that would be on the expensive side, but neat. Or I could just upgrade my OS to Windows XP and stop worrying about running out of address bits for a few more years, at least until drives larger than 2 terabytes become commonplace.