Hard Drive Hell
Ok, so my super awesome PC that I built in 2k5 isn't so awesome anymore. I get that. In fact, it is kind of a dinsaur.
Single-Core 939 CPU, 400 DDR ram, Gigabyte GA K8NF-9 1.x, single 512 NVidia 7600 GT Vid card. It is old. Even my monitors are old. I have a 20" CRT and a 17" CRT. The 20" is a heavy mother.
Hell, I even reverted back to an old PS/2 montor.
So, anyway, when my Hard drive crapped out on me, due to my own negligence and over hurryness, I immediately started saving for a new HD. I have really gotten out of touch with PC building apparently, because I figured that I would just go down to Frys and pick me up another couple of 50 Gb HD's. A couple of Hitachi Deskstars again. That is my favorite. Last night, I finally got the money saved, more than enough, I figured, for 2 hard drives. I walked into the HD section and found 500Gb and 1Tb HD's. There was 1 300Gb HD, which I would love to have, but it was a beast of a HD, I think it is called a Velociraptor. This thing had 32mb of cache, 3 ms write time, 1.3ms read time, almost 0 expected bad sectors (I hate that, it is like saying that if you get a new 50" LCD, it is ok to have a certain amount of dead pixels. NO! I want my entire HD!). It was awesome. It was also $189. Yeah, no thank you.
Why don't I want a large HD? Because HD's fail. The bigger they are, the closer to seppaku you want to be when they do fail. Imaging having 500 Gb of stuff gone. Sure, you can back up, copy files, etc, but when it comes down to it, you will still lose data. Maybe it is that final that you have been working on, maybe it is all the pictures that you took of your family. Your great grandma's last Christmas, or something like that. With a bunch of little ones, you can do what I do. I download the files on one drive, then copy to my other drive immediately. Well, up until my other drive had failed me. It was sad, but I said "I still have an external, and an internal. I will just backup onto my external." Then my external failed, and I hadn't backed up for over a month, it was bad.
So, anyway, back to Frys. I asked the guy at the counter. He told me about a 300Gb Samsung (seagate) HD. I hate Seagate, but what the hell. It was only $75.
He did not, however, tell me that it was not IDE. My PC doesn't have a SATA power plug, and it doesn't boot from SATA, it is like having a great storage drive.
Today I found that I can run a program when I F6 in the XP setup that will fix that.
So what, you may be asking, is this all about?
It is about me having to get convertors and crap to make a SATA HD work, when all I want is a nice old IDE HD, but since Mobo manf. are as evil as their software buddies, we have to upgrade everytime we sneeze. I hate it and I hate windows with their "now that everyone is finally switching to Vista, lets make Windows 7.", which has forced me to go back to XP again. What the holy hell is wrong with Vista? It does what I want it to.
Not only that, but Vista has the best media center ever. It is almost as good as one you would pay a couple hundred for. Guess what? Windows 7 doesn't have Media Center. They are going to charge for it. Bastards.
Thanks for reading, I just needed to write.
Single-Core 939 CPU, 400 DDR ram, Gigabyte GA K8NF-9 1.x, single 512 NVidia 7600 GT Vid card. It is old. Even my monitors are old. I have a 20" CRT and a 17" CRT. The 20" is a heavy mother.
Hell, I even reverted back to an old PS/2 montor.
So, anyway, when my Hard drive crapped out on me, due to my own negligence and over hurryness, I immediately started saving for a new HD. I have really gotten out of touch with PC building apparently, because I figured that I would just go down to Frys and pick me up another couple of 50 Gb HD's. A couple of Hitachi Deskstars again. That is my favorite. Last night, I finally got the money saved, more than enough, I figured, for 2 hard drives. I walked into the HD section and found 500Gb and 1Tb HD's. There was 1 300Gb HD, which I would love to have, but it was a beast of a HD, I think it is called a Velociraptor. This thing had 32mb of cache, 3 ms write time, 1.3ms read time, almost 0 expected bad sectors (I hate that, it is like saying that if you get a new 50" LCD, it is ok to have a certain amount of dead pixels. NO! I want my entire HD!). It was awesome. It was also $189. Yeah, no thank you.
Why don't I want a large HD? Because HD's fail. The bigger they are, the closer to seppaku you want to be when they do fail. Imaging having 500 Gb of stuff gone. Sure, you can back up, copy files, etc, but when it comes down to it, you will still lose data. Maybe it is that final that you have been working on, maybe it is all the pictures that you took of your family. Your great grandma's last Christmas, or something like that. With a bunch of little ones, you can do what I do. I download the files on one drive, then copy to my other drive immediately. Well, up until my other drive had failed me. It was sad, but I said "I still have an external, and an internal. I will just backup onto my external." Then my external failed, and I hadn't backed up for over a month, it was bad.
So, anyway, back to Frys. I asked the guy at the counter. He told me about a 300Gb Samsung (seagate) HD. I hate Seagate, but what the hell. It was only $75.
He did not, however, tell me that it was not IDE. My PC doesn't have a SATA power plug, and it doesn't boot from SATA, it is like having a great storage drive.
Today I found that I can run a program when I F6 in the XP setup that will fix that.
So what, you may be asking, is this all about?
It is about me having to get convertors and crap to make a SATA HD work, when all I want is a nice old IDE HD, but since Mobo manf. are as evil as their software buddies, we have to upgrade everytime we sneeze. I hate it and I hate windows with their "now that everyone is finally switching to Vista, lets make Windows 7.", which has forced me to go back to XP again. What the holy hell is wrong with Vista? It does what I want it to.
Not only that, but Vista has the best media center ever. It is almost as good as one you would pay a couple hundred for. Guess what? Windows 7 doesn't have Media Center. They are going to charge for it. Bastards.
Thanks for reading, I just needed to write.