Ventured out to the local electronics superstore last night to grab an enticingly priced Kingston 1GB miniSD card ($29 CDN). While there I spied a stack of 200GB 7200RPM ATA-100 hard drives going for the negligible price of $79 CDN, so I grabbed one of those.
Products chosen and in hand, I deftly avoiding the commissioned sales staff who so carefully avoided me when I was actually in the technology area -- where I presented a potential source of complex questions -- but now wanted to verbally "claim" the sale, however marginal.
"You all done there sir?" echoed off my heels as I retreated to the door.
The hard drive enticed me as I have a dated PC that
had been stumbling by with a rather old and noisy 60GB hard drive
as the boot/system drive, a second, larger drive doing storage duty
off a SATA wire. I have a limited interest in expensive upgrades as
I just plan on replacing the whole PC, but a little extra space in
the meantime would allow me to set up a bit of redundancy between
the drives in addition to normal backup strategies.
Hanging the old and new drive off ATA wires, I had the data copied over with a burned image of the very useful g4u (a quick copydisk and the new was ready to replace the old). Moments later the old drive was out and the new drive was booting much quicker and quieter than the old, ready for a copious new 140GB partition to be created.
The $79 drive is actually a WD2000JB, which was originally released in late 2002. It's hardly cutting edge, but hard drive technology hasn't exactly been moving at that brisk of a pace so it really isn't that far out of the state of the art.
All in all it was a speedy little upgrade for just $79, implemented painlessly in minutes.
If there were an inexpensive external RAID-capable enclosure with ATA-100 connectors, I'd grab a gaggle of these drives and cluster them -- alone they aren't terribly fast, but several drives working together would provide some killer performance.
With desktops I've always gone for 2-drives at a minimum. Even without any sort of performance RAID, simply putting the page file on the second drive has proven to be a huge performance improvement for many demanding applications, as does the intelligent storage of work and data files.