You've all been sick to death with hearing about my hard-drive space
problems etc.
As far as I can tell they have now been solved for the foreseeable future. :-)
I had a 40 GB seagate HDD in my Acer computer which, as far as I could
tell, was unable to recognise HDD space exceeding 137GB.
So, on the strength of advice from Chuck, I obtained a card from Newegg
which got around that problem and would allow me to add external drives of
1 TB etc.
I bought a 2nd hand 80 GB drive which I was going to fit inside the case.
In the end, I was so confused by all the instructions I could find on the
internet, and which came with the card, that I decided to take it to the
computer technician I have been using for at least 15 years.
The first thing he said, once the introductories were over, was that the
motherboard did not have the 137gb limit, and to prove that assertion, he
disconnected my hdd and plugged in a 500BG Hitachi drive he used in his
work for data transfer - and guess what? The computer "saw" all 500 GB.
Hmmm.
I told him I was beginning to have reservations about the reliability of the 40
GB Seagate drive that has been on this machine since time began. He took
one look at it, and listened to it, and agreed with me. Apparently this batch
of Seagate drives came from a set that Seagate bought from Maxtor; a set
that was So BAD that it sent Maxtor to the wall, and re-sold them. Including
on my machine.
While my machine does have two drive bays, they are too close together
and HDDs in those adjoining bays would get too hot, and die early, as a
result of the over-heating.
So he sold me ONE new 320 GB drive, and using Ghost, transferred the
40GB data to the 320 GB drive.
He then used an expensive de-fragmentation program to totally defragment
the data-set on the new drive so that no fragmentation exists. Not a half-
baked defrag like what Windows does.
He installed the NewEgg ( Rosewill Taiwan RC-221 eSATA-150 Raid card)
with two external ports - PCI adapter. I didn't need all the stuff that
Rosewill
included on their CDROM since Windows XP update 3 (which my machine
fortuitously has) recognised it already.
Next was the matter of the A-Data flash drives which contained 15 GB of my
photos, all neatly in subdirectories. I had two copies of these and one had
already become slightly corrupted. He has managed to copy all of the good
flash drive to my new HDD. Had things been difficult, he had recourse to
$5,000 data recovery program he has bought.
So now this machine can flea or fly or whatever. :-)
The new drive cost me $NZ 134, and he charged only $80 (one hour)
labour. I think he undercharged me.
The only downside so far is that the new HDD sounds a bit like a distant
helicopter. I guess I'll get used to that.
And I can still add a 1TB external drive.
He was very concerned about the idea of using hdd's as long-term storage.
He didn't think that was a good idea at all.
He keeps his extensive archive of driver programs etc in a set of CDROMs
housed in two electric "carousels" rather like Kodak slide projector
carousels; all totally enclosed, and with their own indexing and searching
ability.
I told him about you guys with back-up drives in concrete bunkers separate
from the house and fired up only once a month ...
Brian Swale.
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