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Son of SATA

Soapy Sam

Penultimate Amazing
S
Joined
Oct 23, 2002
Messages
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I want to replace a 60GB EIDE hard drive (internal) with a 250GB SATA internal.

I know nothing about SATA drives. My PC is a 2GHz PIV about 3 years old. Is there likely to be any problem replacing an EIDE HD with a SAT one? Is there a fundamental difference in control system, drivers, etc? I use XP (SP2).
 
A few issues:

1. Your motherboard might not have a SATA interface it. Check that. (A 250GB EIDE drive will be almost exactly as fast, and slightly cheaper, BTW - especially if you don't have an SATA adapter or cables).

2. Be sure to order the SATA cable (and probably power adapter) at the same time. If you don't have one, Comp*USA and Radio Shack and other half-wit stores don't carry them.

3. Usually, you can add the second drive and leave the old one in place. This will actually be a little faster, as your OS partition can remain unchanged, and your great, big data drive can be out there and seeked independantly. Also, you won't have to transfer all the OS and data over to the new drive to get to use it. Move your 'My Documents' folder to the new drive, and other work files, and keep them all seperate from the OS partition. It's the best way.

4. If you stick with EIDE, make sure the hard drive and CD ROM aren't on the same cable.
 
Thanks, Dave. There are already two EIDE drives in there- a 40Gb with the OS and a 60 which is going to be moved to another machine in my mother's house, which I use for burglar proof backups.

The 250 HD will be used mainly for photographs. An EIDE will be just as good, I expect; I just wondered how long they will be supported now SATA seems to be the rising standard.

Your points 1 and 2 address exactly the sort of concerns I have.
I can find no reference to SATA in the motherboard manual , such as it is, or online, so I assume the answer is "No. It has no such adapter"- and there is certainly no obvious vacant slot.

I'll go for EIDE.
 
The majority of a sata drive is identical to an ide drive, so there's very little speed difference between them. I currently have two sata drives, but my boot drive is still an ide, and will remain so for some time. I had endless troubles when I made one of the sata drives the book drive, particularly when adding or removing drives.

Cheers,
Rat.
 
I chickened out. Went to (Turns face away in shame) PCWorld. They had one 250GB Freecom external USB2 drive and I wimped out and bought it. The 60GB can stay put and I can tote this one to the girlfriend's place when required.


New toy! Hee-hee!:D
 
Actually, it's a good choice. You can do simple backups to the external hard disk, for one thing.

Of course, if you walked into a retail store like that and bought it, you paid approximately double what an on-line retailer would've charged.

I have found the external enclosures tend to be a lot louder than an internally mounted drive, but since mine's primarily for backups, it's no real issue for me.
 
Dave,


The drive cost me £155. They only had one. It was returned stock-original packaging, unopened, and fully guaranteed. Cheapest I could find it online was £139, including delivery. Yes it would have been cheaper, but I wanted to get started.

I'm afraid all UK prices look extortionate to you. (Multiply by 1.84 for dollars. Diesel is currently £0.90 a litre by the way. Yes, around $7 a US gallon.)
The double whammy is that I work for a US company and am on a dollar payroll. So I get to pay high UK prices on a steadily falling salary.
Still, there are no pockets in a coffin.

Edit- I tried doing a backup of the old laptop using XP's backup utility. Estimated time 1 Day 12 Hours.
"Copy" estimates 140 minutes. (The laptop is USB 1.1)
If that doesn't work, I'll try XCopy.
Just as well I started early...
 
Cardbus/PCMCIA USB2 controllers can be had that would fix that for your notebook. You'll get roughly 40x the throughput.

I use 'robocopy' for Windows, or 'rsync' for linux to do the backups.

It's a command line utility, so it can be put in a batch or scripted. That allows for total control of the backup.

I do two forms of backup for sensitive work, an 'archive' one where I let old files accumulate, and a 'mirror' one where I keep only the current files. This allows me to recover old files I accidentally deleted (or deliberately deleted and then discovered I wanted), and also to recover the latest state of my work.

For other stuff, I just do a mirror copy, and it's fine.

Most importantly, if not much has changed, the batch won't copy things that are the same as the last backup, so a complete update of the backup to HDD only takes a couple of minutes.

Code: 
set mflags=/MIR /xo /R:0 /A-:R
set aflags=/E /xo /R:0 /A-:R
set dst=k:
set mirror=%dst%\Backup\Mirror
set archive=%dst%\Backup\Archive
set recover=%dst%\Backup\Recovery

@echo Recovery Backups
robocopy %aflags% "E:\Archives\Recovery" %recover%
robocopy %aflags% "C:\Config" %recover%\Config
robocopy %mflags% "C:\Documents and Settings\dave" "%recover%\dave"

@echo Mirror Backups
robocopy %mflags% "E:\CVS" %mirror%\CVS
robocopy %mflags% "C:\Program Files\GNU\WinCvs 1.3\Settings" %mirror%\CVS\Settings
robocopy %mflags% "D:\My Documents" "%mirror%\My Documents"
robocopy %mflags% "D:\Mail" %mirror%\Mail
robocopy %mflags% "D:\Work" %mirror%\Work
robocopy %mflags% "D:\Jakks" %mirror%\Jakks

@echo Mirror Other Junk
robocopy %mflags% "D:\Games" %mirror%\Games
robocopy %mflags% "E:\CD-IMAGE" %mirror%\CD-IMAGE
robocopy %mflags% "E:\Download" %mirror%\Download
robocopy %mflags% "E:\Movies" %mirror%\Movies
robocopy %mflags% "E:\Music" %mirror%\Music

@echo Archive Backups
robocopy %aflags% "E:\CVS" %archive%\CVS
robocopy %aflags% "D:\My Documents" "%archive%\My Documents"
robocopy %aflags% "D:\Work" %archive%\Work
robocopy %aflags% "E:\Archives\OldWork" %archive%\OldWork
robocopy %aflags% "D:\Jakks" %archive%\Jakks
echo.
echo.
@echo Backup VMWare data?
pause
robocopy %mflags% "D:\VMWare" %mirror%\VMWare
 
evildave said:
(snip)Move your 'My Documents' folder to the new drive (snip)
Click to expand...
Warning: derail!
How can I do this. I have removed "My Documents" from the desktop so I supposed I have to change a registry setting. Right?
Which one?
 
My Documents is part of a user profile. There might be several copies on your machine, depending on users.
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows \Currentversion\ Explorer \User Shell Folders

would be a good place to look.

I advise downloading Tweakui from the Powertoys suite at Microsoft.com

I actually never use the "My Documents" folder at all. Or any preset Windows data folder. Or Address Book. But I'm paranoid.
 
Dave- I take it "Robocopy" is not part of Windows? I used to use XCOPY under W9x , but can never get it to work from CMD in WinXP.
 
"xcopy /h /e /r /d /i /c /k /y srcpath dstpath" will also work. Yes, it spells "her dicky", and that makes it a little easier to remember. Xcopy won't delete obsolete files, though.

Robocopy is part of the windows resource kit. I use it because it's a little faster, and has that '/mir' option, which can delete obsolete files in the backup, and has some copy status junk, and can be restarted when interrupted during long network copies.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&DisplayLang=en

Unfortunately, you have to download quite a bit of other junk to get your hands on it. Fortunately, you can copy it out of the install folder, and uninstall the whole mess shortly afterwards.
 
Ye gods! I think I already have that somewhere. You see why I need to get these HDs sorted out.
 
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