Curiosity: How many harddrives do you have?

[neilthecellist]

So, here's the survey question for you audiophiles: How many harddrives do you have? What is on each harddrive? Audio? games only? stuff you don't want your kids to see? ^_^


Personally, i have 2 harddrives, Drive C: and Drive D: (I'll switch Drive D: to Drive H: for less confusion)


Drive H: has all my audio and games on it. Drive C: has everything else.

[LtData]

2 HDDs, internal 40GB and external 160GB

internal drive is partioned into 20GB for windows, rest for linux.

External drive has all my backups, music and music videos.

[ChristinaS]

Usually 2 HD's, each one partitioned into 2 partitions. Currently the second HD (80GB) is not activated, as it was a replacement for a defective drive I sent back. I will be formatting it soon and partitioning it again into 2 partitions. I intend to install XP on one of them. My first drive (120GB) has Windows 2000 and the programs on the first partition (30GB), data is on the second partition (82GB).

I just took a look, and I seem to be running low on space on my active HD. I tend to accumulate so much junk!

[neilthecellist]

clean it out then. ;)

[donny]

well there are two hard drives here, and 6 partititons on them (+2 for linux)
the largest partition is 30 GB and the music is there... I'm thinking of changing and making everything bigger...

[neilthecellist]

out of curioisyt, is it 5400 rpm 7200 rpm, ata or sata?

[donny]

I have ata disks, one 5400 and one 7200

[neilthecellist]

can you "sense" the speed difference between a 4500 and 7200 cuz I can't.

[Spoon]

Your ears might be able to sense the difference ;)

[neilthecellist]

by the number of beeps the hard drive makes? :confused:

[iceblood]

I voted for 'Other' as I have two drives in my box (the OS and bits'n'pieces on the 6.4gb, binaries on the 80gb) plus four external drives - one each for music (200gb), video (250gb) and comics (200gb), with everything else (mainly spoken word) on the fourth (120gb).

[neilthecellist]

wow . a harddrive with only 6.4 gigs? Maybe I'm too young to see such a sight. I'm only 15. (just turned 15 last october)

Are these harddrives salvaged from old computers or did you go out and buy the extra harddrives?

[iceblood]

I know someone who has a shop so I got them at trade prices :smile2:

[neilthecellist]

wow. LUCKY!

[OldCoder]

Six on my "Windows" box.....

An 80 gig WD partitioned into 10 and 70 for OS and software
A 250 gig Maxtor for projects
A 250 gig and a 200 gig Maxtors for audio projects and collection
A 250 gig and a 200 gig external Maxtors for backup

Why count in gigs when there are terabytes......

There's more on my two mainframes, but they don't run dbpoweramp :cry:

[neilthecellist]

holy crap. that's a lot. wish i had the money.

[OldCoder]

You will have the money someday.

All it takes is age and warped priorities, although it does help to own a software company......

The age isn't as important as the warped priorities.....which also helps as a software developer....

[neilthecellist]

lol I'm 15. I'm getting there!!

[iTunesIsEvil]

2: 1 250G WD IDE
1 80G WD SATA

The big 250 is my 'media' drive and the 80g is for OS and programs. It's currently running WinXP Pro SP2 and Fedora Core3.

Just finished my new machine :) :)

MSI K8T Neo2 FIR Mobo
AMD Athlon64 3200+
1G Kingston RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 5200 FX VidCard
Sony CD-RW/DVDROM
250GB IDE WesternDigital HDD
80GB SATA WesternDigital HDD

[neilthecellist]

hey iTunesIsEvil, where can I find info that tells me how fast s-ATA is compared to stuff like 10,000 RPM Raptor drive , 7200 RPM , 5400 RPM or whatever...?

[LtData]

Here: http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/index.html
As for SATA, right now its not really any faster than ATA133/ATA100 drives as the HDD itself is the bottleneck in transferring. There are a few advances that will change this though. One good things about SATA is the smaller cables.

[Smoggy]

computer 1 120gb
Computer 2 60gb
exteranl 250gb

Why is it that when I buy a XXXGB HD I don't get the full potential out of it?
e.g I bought a 250GB and after formatting and what not, I end up with only 232GB???
Am I doing somthing wrong?

[neilthecellist]

Why is it that when I buy a XXXGB HD I don't get the full potential out of it?
e.g I bought a 250GB and after formatting and what not, I end up with only 232GB???
Am I doing somthing wrong?

Smoggy, I learned in Computer Programming last semester at my high school that a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes. If you do the math, you would find out that if you have a 250 GB hard drive, you won't get the full potential, just because bytes are rounded to the nearest tenth in math.

[Smoggy]

hmmmm....Well If Hitachi is printing on their boxes that this is a 250GB Drive then I feel you should be able to get 250GB out of it.

[neilthecellist]

I agree with you on that...but society isn't like that...:(

[LtData]

To HDD manufacturers, 1 gigabyte = 1 billion bytes
To Operating Systems, 1 gigabyte = 2^30 power bytes
Yea, so it means a 160GB drive is only 154.4GB or whatever. Sorry, blame the HDD manufacturers.

[Smoggy]

Bogus!! :vmad:

It's time for a class action false advertising lawsuit!!! LOL :D

[LtData]

It was tried and failed. Your too late. ;)

[ChristinaS]

Actually I thought that the loss comes about after formatting the drive, due to some overhead. You see it even more when you partition the drive and the 2 partitions don't quite add up to the unpartitioned drive capacity. It's the same as for diskettes. Unformatted their stated capacity is larger than 1.44MB. Of course now all you get are formatted diskettes - and even those are on their last leg it seems, after being replaced by other media.

[neilthecellist]

Bah, WHO CARES? I mean, seriously, it's just a few gigs you lost. Big deal. Were you seriously gonna fill up those few gigs that you supposedly lost due to overhead or whatever?

[LtData]

There IS some overhead loss when formatting, yes, but not on the order of how it happens with large HDDs. Its due to rounding.

[neilthecellist]

I'm surprised my thread got this popular! :)

Are there differences when installing different OSes like Macintosh or Linux?

[Smoggy]

It's 18GB Thats alot of space!!!
Thats like 3000 mp3s

[LtData]

Depending on the file system your using, the overhead DOES vary, yes. And I'd say less than 1GB is used in the overhead. Its all lost due to the rounding.

On a side note, IDE cables with a 2mm section of one wire missing are BAD!

[Smoggy]

On a side note, IDE cables with a 2mm section of one wire missing are BAD!

That doesn't sound like much fun.

[ChristinaS]

Bah, WHO CARES? I mean, seriously, it's just a few gigs you lost. Big deal. Were you seriously gonna fill up those few gigs that you supposedly lost due to overhead or whatever?
The first pc I had with a hard drive had a 40MB hard drive which was awesome at the time. :D

My older laptop has a 10GB hard drive. Can't exactly afford to lose all that much, can I?

Some variations may be due to the type of formatting: FAT32 vs NTFS. I don't know which one is more wasteful.

[Smoggy]

My first computer didn't have a hard drive. The operating system was stored on a 5 1/4 inch floppy LOL...U had to insert it before booting up the computer.

And the one my dad had before that...long before that was a TSR80 (Radio Shack) It ran off a cassett tape :lustig1:

[ChristinaS]

My first computer didn't have a hard drive. The operating system was stored on a 5 1/4 inch floppy LOL...U had to insert it before booting up the computer.

And the one my dad had before that...long before that was a TSR80 (Radio Shack) It ran off a cassett tape :lustig1:
I said "the first pc I had WITH a hard drive". My first PC didn't have a hard drive etiher - only a single 5 1/4 in floppy drive, cca 1982-1983. Never owned any others before that. The 2nd pc I had finally got a hard drive put in after a while :D That was cca 1984 I think.

[Smoggy]

things seemed alot easier then...Didn't they?

LOL

[LtData]

NTFS has more overhead than FAT32 for smaller drives (couple of gigs) but for large drives, its better than FAT32, IIRC... It might be larger for ALL drives, but NTFS works for drives over 127.8GB or whatever that number is...

And yea, the IDE cable was bad. It kept the computer from booting and sometimes from even recognizing the IDE devices. ...What is the topic again?

[neilthecellist]

lol it's my thread, isn't it? I dun care what you guys talk about, as long as it's about hard drives!

[ChristinaS]

things seemed alot easier then...Didn't they?

LOL
They didn't seem, they were easier LOL!

For one thing, no registry to mess up :D

[Smoggy]

lol it's my thread, isn't it? I dun care what you guys talk about, as long as it's about hard drives!

This is turning into computer history 101 :D

[neilthecellist]

nothing wrong with that. :D

[Razgo]

well my first pc had a wopping 120meg harddrive and 4meg of ram which was considerd fairly high end back then. i think that was only 1992 from memory.

i have a 4GIG, 6GIG, 80GIG, then my notebook is 20GIG and my external drive is 80GIG

[neilthecellist]

Ugh, speaking of harddrives, I just ran out of space yesterday when I installed Half-Life 2 on my comptuter via Steam.....I have 810 MB left....I'm backing up some stuff to CD's now....

[wmjordan]

OMG! So many guys have more than one harddrives.
I have gotten only one sittin' in my box, but I have a 10GB USB mobile drive still runnin'. Dunno whether I should count it in ^______^

[neilthecellist]

is it more typical for computer programmers to have multiple hard drives?

[iTunesIsEvil]

is it more typical for computer programmers to have multiple hard drives?
I think it's just computer addicts really. And IMO programmers fall right smack at the top of that list.

The reason I have multiple drives is for the largish amount of media I have. 5 seasons of The Simpsons, 3 seasons of Family Guy, 5 seasons of Futurama, 1 season Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, 1 season Sealab 2021, about 25 full-length movies (those are all DivX convs from DVDs I or my gf own), another good 20 gigs of other video miscellany, and something like 10 gigs of 192kbps/128kbps AAC audio (CD rips, and iTMS purchases).

If I didn't have all that stuff I'd just have my 80gig SATA drive. As it is the SATA drive is partitioned for SuSE (30gig) and Windows XP (50gig). The WinXP partition has all of the OS on it, and all of my apps are installed there, plus thats where I keep my directory of programming stuff.

If I could get MonoDevelop working in SuSE I'd be programming some C# there, and then I could take up a little more of the room I've afforded linux. I shouldn't have given it such a large chunk o' space since it can see my music (but not play it) and videos and anything else on my NTFS partitions.

[Pardon the rambling, I'm bored this morning.]

[donny]

how do you mean linux can see but not play your music and video? I know that linux shouldn't write on ntfs partitions, but I'm playing my music normally from a ntfs partition...

[iTunesIsEvil]

how do you mean linux can see but not play your music and video? I know that linux shouldn't write on ntfs partitions, but I'm playing my music normally from a ntfs partition...
I can't find something for SuSE that will play an m4a audio file. It'll play mp3, but not AAC audio. And it does play video just fine (avi, mpg, wmv) etc.

And SuSE has "experimental" write capabilities to an NTFS partition, but last time I tried that Windows wouldnt boot afterwards. Hehheh! :teufel8:

[LtData]

Don't bother with NTFS writing in Linux for now.
Have you tried XMMS? It seems to support AAC files. At least it has a IO plugin for it.

[neilthecellist]

IO...../me googles.

[LtData]

Input/Output

[neilthecellist]

Right. Stupidity alert of Neil.

[tunetyme]

I have 3 drives. I use one 80GB as my primary drive with all my software. I have a second 250GB drive that is used exclusively for audio files. Finally I have an external 250GB drive to backup my audio files. The biggest frustration is making sure that the backup is current. Is there some way to synchronze these automatically?

[LtData]

You'll need some backup software to do that. One of the better ones is Danz Retrospect Backup.

[neilthecellist]

SATA or regular ATA?

[neilthecellist]

BUMP.

Please?

[Wayne]

I have just added a 300GB Sata drive (7200 rpm) to my existing 2x80GB IDE drives. I plan to use it to hold all my multi-media (audio/video) files.

Wayne

[Hyrize]

i just have an ickle 60Gb drive in my lappy and store most stuff (audio and video) on my server which has 4 drives ('bout 200Gb space all up) and a wireless connection in between:smile2:

[neilthecellist]

Wireless? Nice...

[brian10161]

right now, i have 4 hard drives. an 80gb in my desktop (12gbs worth of music and stuff on it) 2 external hard drives (ones a 40gb and the other is a 4gb the 4 was pulled out of a smashed laptop) and in my laptop i have a 40gb with 2.6gb on it. i dont tend to put to much on my drives, and i dont like to partition them. so thats my setup.

[neilthecellist]

FYI guys, I just got a free laptop donation from school. It has 11 GB of hard drive space at 4200 RPM...Sucks, but free, so I'm not complaining. :)

[Razgo]

laptops rule :thumbup: :D

[neilthecellist]

I concur. :)

[milfzor]

been quite a while since i posted, but here we go....
connected to my pc currently, i have 2 harddrives, one 250gb hitachi hdd, and one 60gb WD harddrive, i also have a 160gb maxtor harddrive in my ps2, and a 40gb hdd in my xbox, i also currently have a 60gb hdd in a pc that im in the process of trying to rid myself of, and a 10gb harddrive sittin around doing a whole lot of nothing, so in total, including my video game systems, i've got 540gb of hdd space :D

[PDubya]

Well, on my main development / music machine:

- 5x 300gb WD HDD on a NetCell SR5103 in a Raid-5 configuration (Music)
- 2x 500gb on-board Raid-1+0 Seagates (Development / VM's)
- 1x 300gb WD HDD (OS)

I use the raid-5 array for all of my music mostly. I used to be a DJ and have a TON of music. Once a decent SATA raid-5 controller came out that wasn't the cost of a small child, I pounced on it. I got tired of having hundreds of DVD's, CD's, and music on 20 different hard drives. Worth biting the bullet - and the added bonus of the safety net with a HDD crash is a nice benefit.

The mirror is for my development files and virtual machines. The drives finally came down to a reasonable price and made it nice to have all the VM's in a single location.

Other than that, pretty routine config.

[DudeBoyz]

I have 5 Western Digital 120 gig SE drives and 1 Western Digital 500 gig SATA drive in the same machine.

[neilthecellist]

I've been wondering... Is it time to move beyond SATA I and SATA II and onto one of those newer hard drives?

By the way I'm a video gamer. Does that change anything?

[LtData]

What do you mean "newer hard drives"? I was under the impression most HDDs are either IDE or SATA, with server HDDs mostly being SCSI. Is there a new interface?

[bhoar]

What do you mean "newer hard drives"? I was under the impression most HDDs are either IDE or SATA, with server HDDs mostly being SCSI. Is there a new interface?

I'd say the "newest" ones I can think of are the solid state ones, but they continue to use PATA or SATA interfaces.

-brendan