More on Hard Drives

[tesla]

Hmm. Thank you for the comments on my hard drive post. Rather than making the same reply to each of them, I thought I would put it here:

I do currently use an external HD for data backup. Of course I'm not running my apps from there - doing so would be painfully slow.

My rule of thumb: I will never ever leave any file un-backed up. This means that it MUST be stored in at least two physically distinct locations (preferably more) at all times. No exceptions. Oh, and even though I ripped the vast majority of my music from CD, the CDs don't count as backups, since it would take way too long to recover from them.

So at this point I either need to copy my 40GB of music to a new external source, which would cost me at least $60 and put an additional thing on my desk/floor, OR I need to get myself a bigger internal HD. I'm thinking of going the latter route because it seems simpler: have one complete set of files on the internal drive, a second complete set on the external.

I do take very seriously sarendipatree's caveat to make sure that my motherboard can cope with a larger HD, and am researching that now.

Am I missing something obvious here?

Comments

[fredcritter.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure about relative costs and functionality (my wee bit of hardware geekness doesn't extend very far into Windows machines) but I ended up being able to install 1Tb of SATA hard disks in my (very old) Blue&White G3 Macintosh by the simple expedient of buying a SATA card to go with them. So when I'm able to upgrade (soon, I hope, as Adobe CS3 stuff won't run on a G3), I'll be able to simply pull the drives out of this box and drop them into the new one.

[sarendipatree.livejournal.com]

Do you remember what year you bought your computer? Cuz if its past 2004, its probably okay. (For comparison's sake, I bought my computer in 2001. I know, but it still does what I want it to do without screwing up and I'm loathe to screw with success too much. =%> )