hard drive
Jan. 13th, 2002 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioI went to CompUSA today to augment my poor little 6-gig drive, which is mostly full. (Well, Partition Magic is holding 1 gig hostage for unknown reasons, but I've reached my frustration threshold there and no longer care except as a matter of principle. Remember when a gig was a lot?)
After staring at the wall of hard drives for a couple minutes and being unable to find all the specs I wanted (seek time! give me seek time!), I asked the nice sales person who was hovering for help. I said: "I have a 2-year-old computer, a SCSI card, and a free USB port. I want cheap not-too-slow disk space, preferably external so I can use it for backups. I don't care about games. What do you recommend?" He dismissed SCSI immediately (and in fact they didn't seem to have any SCSI drives in evidence); I half-expected him to ask me if I was up to date on my goat sacrifices or some such. [1]
So then he said that I want either USB or Firewire. Tell me about Firewire, I said. I need an adapter that's about $50, and it's fast. USB is slow if it's version 1 (probably the case on a 2-year-old computer), and according to the disk packaging as fast as Firewire if it's version 2. (Actually, they're claiming it's faster, but I detect marketing fluff.)
A 40-gig USB drive costs $150. The smallest Firewire drive (I think it was 80-gig) was something like $350. Plus the adapter, of course.
Every time I have spent extra money to get the latest and greatest for a computer, I have regretted it. I still begrudge the $100 I spent in 1997 to upgrade the Pentium 133 package to 160 (? different chip, details forgotten), which was going to make all the difference in the world. Maybe it even did, for a month or two.
So I figured that if I find the USB too slow, I can upgrade to version 2 (that card also costs around $50). Meanwhile, the next computer I buy will almost certainly have the latest USB version as part of the package, while I'd probably have to buy Firewire (or move the card, if I'm not keeping the old machine). And having a USB device means I can use the drive to lazily produce off-site backups; I have a large hard drive at work (but no Firewire there).
And, when Firewire is the norm and USB drives are a quaint oddity, well, I'll probably think that 40-gig is on the small side anyway. :-)
[1] "SCSI is *NOT* magic. There are *fundamental technical reasons* why it is necessary to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain now and then." -- jfw@proteon.com (John Woods)
After staring at the wall of hard drives for a couple minutes and being unable to find all the specs I wanted (seek time! give me seek time!), I asked the nice sales person who was hovering for help. I said: "I have a 2-year-old computer, a SCSI card, and a free USB port. I want cheap not-too-slow disk space, preferably external so I can use it for backups. I don't care about games. What do you recommend?" He dismissed SCSI immediately (and in fact they didn't seem to have any SCSI drives in evidence); I half-expected him to ask me if I was up to date on my goat sacrifices or some such. [1]
So then he said that I want either USB or Firewire. Tell me about Firewire, I said. I need an adapter that's about $50, and it's fast. USB is slow if it's version 1 (probably the case on a 2-year-old computer), and according to the disk packaging as fast as Firewire if it's version 2. (Actually, they're claiming it's faster, but I detect marketing fluff.)
A 40-gig USB drive costs $150. The smallest Firewire drive (I think it was 80-gig) was something like $350. Plus the adapter, of course.
Every time I have spent extra money to get the latest and greatest for a computer, I have regretted it. I still begrudge the $100 I spent in 1997 to upgrade the Pentium 133 package to 160 (? different chip, details forgotten), which was going to make all the difference in the world. Maybe it even did, for a month or two.
So I figured that if I find the USB too slow, I can upgrade to version 2 (that card also costs around $50). Meanwhile, the next computer I buy will almost certainly have the latest USB version as part of the package, while I'd probably have to buy Firewire (or move the card, if I'm not keeping the old machine). And having a USB device means I can use the drive to lazily produce off-site backups; I have a large hard drive at work (but no Firewire there).
And, when Firewire is the norm and USB drives are a quaint oddity, well, I'll probably think that 40-gig is on the small side anyway. :-)
[1] "SCSI is *NOT* magic. There are *fundamental technical reasons* why it is necessary to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain now and then." -- jfw@proteon.com (John Woods)
(no subject)
Date: 2002-01-13 10:39 pm (UTC)I did consider buying a FireWire card for my new machine, but decided to hold out for a few more months, since the thing was already costing me a fair bit o' cash...
(no subject)
Date: 2002-01-14 06:44 am (UTC)FWIW, the 40-gig USB box was $150 at CompUSA, 80-gig was I think $200, and there were bigger ones (I know I saw 120). I thought about it and decided I was buying for the medium-term, not the long-term, so 40G would hold me while the competing protocols sort themselves out in the market. By the time I need to replace this, I'll know whether I want USB or FireWire, rather than guessing. :-)