cyranoVR's Journal: More hardware stuff - "Bargain Hunting"

Well, just when I thought I got a good deal on the hard drive, I found a better one. It turns out that compusa was selling a 120 GB Maxtor drive for 109.99 so now Staples has lowered their price to match. Plus, Maxtor is offering a $30 mail-in rebate until August, so long story short $$$!!!. However, I will have to find time to go return the hard drive and pick up the new one...and can I get back the $15 coupon and apply it to the new drive? (answer: store credit, DUH) This is turning into a chore.

(BTW - yes the compusa lists the hard drive as "generic." I have no idea why they do this, although some have theorized that the reason to be that compusa wants to ward off price-matching bargain-hunter-types)

Then there are other issues. I recently realized that the motherboard (provided it works at all) only supports UDMA/66. I don't know much about hardware, but I think this means that the speed of the Ultra ATA/133 will be largely wasted (and maybe the HD will be maddeningly slow?) I guess I could buy a ATA/133 PCI card if I need it.

And will linux be able to use the Maxtor drive? It has "Requirements: Windows98SE/2000SP3/XP" plastered all over it.

I guess finding out will be part of the "phun" of using linux.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Before you return your old drive...

[cyranoVR]

Thank you for the info...It's tempting...but:

64.98 / 120GB = $0.5415/GB

($65 = $109.98 - $30 mrb - $15 coupon)

whereas

$100 / 160 GB = $0.625/GB

I don't really need the extra 40GB (I'm not sure what to do with 120GB as it is) and I don't really want to spend another $35 that I don't really need (remember my <$200 goal?) AND I will have the Staples store credit anyway...hmmm have I rationalized it enough yet? :)

Actually, I am going a bit crazy because my co-workers found out about my "build a pc" projec

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...

[Trolling4Dollars]

And will linux be able to use the Maxtor drive? It has "Requirements: Windows98SE/2000SP3/XP" plastered all over it.

I've used Maxtors pretty exclusively under Linux. Including the CompUSA rebranded ones. They tend to be my favorites in terms of cost. I've had about a third of them go bad after about 2-3 years of constant beating. Pay no attention to the Windows warnings. Windows is not a requirement, just a recommendation on their part.

Some of the CompUSA rebranded Maxtors I've gotten came with PCI

Ditto ATA speeds

[gmhowell]

Don't worry about the speeds. Very little difference between 66, 100 and 133. If it's that big a deal, you can get a Promise IDE card for about $20 that works very, very well in Linux.

Re:Ditto ATA speeds

[ces]

Do be sure to check that UDMA is enabled after you install. On my Mandrake box it defaulted to running in PIO mode 4 for a whopping 2megs/sec. Once I installed the hdparms package and got the startup scripts tuned right I was doing 45megs/sec sustained. It made a *huge* difference in systtem performance.

Re:Ditto ATA speeds

[cyranoVR]

Once I installed the hdparms package and got the startup scripts tuned right I was doing 45megs/sec sustained.

Ummm...startup scripts? Tuned right?

This is going to be interesting to say the least.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Ditto ATA speeds

[ces]

Ummm...startup scripts? Tuned right?

This is going to be interesting to say the least.

Not really. Mandrake normally gets the drive settings right but my installation was a tad screwy due to needing special drivers for my motherboard. (I have an nForce).

It really wasn't that hard. I just had to install the proper package. Figure out where the config file lived and then read the docs so I knew what settings to put in the file.

As far as I know any recent version of Mandrake or RedHat should tune the IDE dr