Next message: jason: "Re: [WinMac] And how do I upgrade to Win98?"
At 04:47 PM 3/27/2000 -0500, Tom Roth wrote:
>I've got an NT workstation at home with a mere 1GB IDE hard drive.
>Available disk space is not too bad but only because I've set NT to
>compress the data on this disk, otherwise I'd probably be out of space
>by now. I'm guessing that setting the disk to be compressed by NT
>causes the system to access the disk slower?
Here's the story on NT disk compression. Access time is actually faster
because there's less to read off the disk. Additional time is then required
by the processor to decompress the data. So whether or not you actually
experience any speed difference depends on your hardware and what you're
doing with it at any given moment. If the machine is old enough to have a
1GB drive, the net effect is probably a slower system.
>If the above is true, what's the easiest way to upgrade to a larger disk
>without having to reinstall everything? I know you can't just select
>all and copy to the new hard drive.
>
>If it matters, I've got a fast and wide scsi card with BIOS already
>installed in this computer so the upgraded hard drive would likely be SCSI.
Use a program like DriveCopy. I'm not recommending it, I've never used it,
it's just an example of a program which can copy the contents of one drive
to another drive. I think such programs cost less than $50. I would
double-check whether moving from IDE to SCSI would create any problems.
Also, can I ask why you're going to switch to SCSI? If you want SCSI's
rock-solidness for something like CD-burning, I'd get an IDE drive for your
OS and programs and a SCSI drive for data. If the switch is purely for
performance reasons, whether or not you will really see a difference may
depend on how recent your IDE is. Since it's a 1Gb drive, I'm guessing it
supports PIO Mode 4 or even 3 so fast/wide SCSI would probably be an
improvement. However, unless you've got a special source for SCSI drives,
you may find that an UltraDMA/66 drive plus a PCI UltraDMA/66 controller
card costs less than just a SCSI drive. Shopper.com lists numerous sites
selling the Promise Tech UltraDMA/66 card for just over $30. Since with
this card you would still be changing which bus your booting drive was on,
you should check to make sure that's not a problem with the drive copying
software.
I'm not trying to "dis" SCSI, it's still great for a lot of things, but the
current spec for IDE/ATAPI has caught up performance-wise for the average user.
--
Curtis Wilcox cwcx@ats.rochester.edu
ATS Desktop Systems Consultant 716/274-1160
Eastman School of Music Pager: x12-3290
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: Mon Mar 27 2000 - 15:40:10 PST