Hi All, DISCLAIMER: This post will be long-winded and full of information, thoughts, ideas and plans. I apologize in advance for pi$$ing anyone off! :-)
Well...I sold my Staples stocks and the cheque finally came in the other day. One of the deals I made with Lisa about selling them, was that I get an 80GB hard drive for my computer...and that is non-negotiable. Thank God she agreed and said it was OK...WHEW!!! All you married guys out there can probably sympathize with how I just dodged a bullet! ;-) Anyways...I have been looking around at the options and have narrowed t down to three names. From what I see out there for industry and customer approval, Maxtor has an excellent reputation and a good product. But...I also here that Seagate and Western Digital and pretty much the same and offer excellent products as well. I am preferable to an 80GB with ATA/133 and an 8MB cache. I am looking this way because I want it to have as much longevity and future-proofing as possible. The system it will be going into is a 700Mhz Athalon that runs excellently and currently houses a vintage and fairly (few burps but nothing major) stables Windows 2000 partition, a data partition and a small partition housing my swap and temporary internet files. I am looking at clearing off some of the current data and making room for a Linux partition. I am probably going to experiment with Topogogolinux (think that's the name), as it installs inside a virtual drive without the need for further partitioning. The following is Phase One of my home network and I have been thinking and have pretty much decided (although I am flexible) on the following items: * 486 integrated with monitor and CD-ROM drive and 1.7 GB HDD: Will house a MS-DOS, Windows 3.X and Slackware mix and will primarily act as a monitoring box and could potentially act as an answering machine and fax server. * 200 Mhz with 2.5 GB HDD: Currently has RH 8.0 for experimentation purposes. With Have 20 GB drive switched in and will act as Windows (possibly 9X to 2K). * Athalon with 20 GB HDD: Primary machine right now which houses 2K partition. Topo. distro will be for testing and evaluation purposes and 80GB as slave until full migration complete. 80GB will then have a minimum or system and data partitions and will act as a file server for phase one. * Old World Mac with System 7.5/8.0: Purely for fun and experimentation. * 200 Mhz with 2-3 GB HDD: Lisa's Mandrake box to be upgraded to 9.2 soon. WHEW!!! So...with all that said and done, I am wondering if anyone can add any insights into my potential network set-up and give me some personal thoughts, statistics, reviews, etc. regarding my choice of drives. I really like the Maxtor, but I don't know if I can really justify almost $200 at Staples for the one I want. I am hoping for something in the $100 range and Memory Express has a couple OEM options available that are closer to my range. So far the leader is an 80GB ATA100 Western Digital with a 8MB cache for about $110.00. Anyone have some better suggestions or different vendors I could be looking at? Perhaps one of our sponsors? Again...sorry for the huge post, but had a lot to ask. If people are more comfortable or wish to slag me...please e-mail me offline. thanks! Cameron _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca
