Next message: Richard Laycock: "Re: [WinMac] upgrading NT boot disk"
> >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?
> Curtis Wilcox replied:
>
> 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.
It's a Pentium 133 w/ 64MB of RAM so it's probably the decompression
time as the disk is probably fairly fast.
> >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.
Our service department had an old copy of something like that. I don't
remember what it's called but it basically said if you had a SCSI drive
then you wouldn't get any additional space but that it would copy your
data, sector for sector. I'm hoping to find something that would do
better then that.
What if I did a complete backup of my system using a backup program.
Install and format the SCSI drive and then do a restore to the SCSI
drive. Then I take out the IDE making the SCSI drive C:, the boot
drive. Think it would work?
> 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.
Somewhat performance in that if I uncompress the drive it may speed up
some and the fast and wide SCSI drive sure couldn't hurt any. Since
it's just a P133 I don't expect it to be significantly faster. The main
reason for SCSI over IDE is simply that we've got some extra ones gather
dust on a shelf.
Thanks for the info Curtis.
______________________________________________________________________
Tom Roth Wake Forest University School of Medicine
tomroth@wfubmc.edu Dept of Biomedical Communications
http://www.wfubmc.edu/biomed/ Medical Center Blvd
Tel 336.716.4493 Winston-Salem, NC 27157-1011
______________________________________________________________________
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: Mon Mar 27 2000 - 18:24:59 PST