Hard drives: what should I get?

[UK31337]

I'm looking for a new HD for my old PC (remember I asked about RAM a while back).

Thing is, I've got plans to dualboot Win2K and Linux. I've seen 120Gb drives for reasonable prices, but I was wondering, should I dualboot from the same drive, or buy 2 separate, smaller drives? I mean, one for each OS?

I've managed fine dualbooting off the same drive before, only problem was my old drive was too small. Not sure if NTFS/Ext3 would live happily together though.

But is it that good a plan? Would you recommend getting one big drive, or 2 smaller ones?

 

[setishock]

2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

With 2 smaller drives if you have a mechcanical failure, you don't lose as much or the whole thing. Samsung spinpoint series is good and for a quite resonable price. Last time I checked the 120gb was $69.00 at microcenter. While the 80gb are $59.00. As are thier dual layer dvd+/- burner.

 

[99nasha]

What are you planning to do with this pc again?

 

[UK31337]

I'm wanting to run Win98SE (or Win2K, haven't decided yet) for everyday use and a Linux distro out of curiosity (probably FC3 because I've got the disks kicking around).

I'm going to be using the machine for a number of things, e.g. software development and maybe run it as a server. tbh I'm not entirely sure, I just want it to work again.

20GB was way too small though.

 

[Kage]

Hi,

It wouldn't make much difference really, as you could do the same with both. I have a 120GB drive I partioned into 4 for all the family members, and end up with about 35gig each or something like that (Giving my sister less as all she has is Sims 2 and Cats hehe).

It might be best to have two seperate smaller drives in your case, again if one fails. If you were worried about hardware failure, you could also set the two hard drives as RAID, so that they copy data to each other, but this would make one not possible to use I think...

It depends really on what you want. You'd probably end up with the same amount of space on the two hard drives as you would with partioning a 120GB drive.

My prefrence would be getting two hard drives for a setup like that (especially with the amount of failures I've had). I would say to partiton if you wanted more than 2 setups for saving room in the computer case.

 

[zero4zero]

I wouldn't see a problem using just one 120 Gig hard disk. But for the partitions make them in accordance to your usage. If you are going to use Linux just a bit, I'd set a 30 Gig partition for it, and the remaining 90, I'd split it 60/30: a partition for the operating system and one for data. If speed matters for you and your mobo supports it, get a SATA hard disk as they give better performance.

 

[Windex1]

ert.. nevermind.