I just got a new 300GB SATA drive that replaced my existing 20GB ATA dinosaur that served as my secondary drive. My motherboard supports both IDE and SATA standards so I wasn't forced to re-install my OS.
The drive took 1.5 hours to format since I skipped the Quick Format option (always a good idea with a new drive). I'm currently moving my iTunes music library and it looks like the file copy will take just as long.
I don't expect much of a speed increase for my system, though I will be sure to put a virtual memory swap file on the drive to get as much parallel disk access as possible. I also set my TEMP and TMP environment variables to a directory on the new drive called D:\TEMP. This should help Windows split I/O between the two drives.
Before this, I had an external USB 2.0 70GB ATA drive that kept my music, photo, family, and source code repositories. I should be able to move all of this onto the bigger drive and use my USB 2.0 drives as backup.
You know what bothers me? Windows doesn't seem to spin down my USB drives when they idle. Perhaps it does, but I'm pretty sure they just keep on spinning regardless of how long they're running idle.
Posted by Nick Codignotto at November 19, 2004 11:01 PM | TrackBack