I'm going to need to replace the drive in this box pretty quick. I'm starting to get the "startup whine and vibrate" which is usually a pretty good indication.

Yup - have backups (teach grandma to suck eggs!) I'm going to put in a couple of all-but-new Maxtor and IBM 40 gig drives I have (1 for Windows, 1 for some flavor of Linux) and I need to buy a decent sized (120 gig?) drive for data storage. I'm leaning toward another Maxtor (don't like Seagate and what's wrong with the one IN this box is that it's a Western Digital); the IBM 40gig is okay, but they're more expensive than Maxtor....

Anyway, original question needs answer first I guess.
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I can't tell if you're making a new box or not, if you aren't just stick with the tried and true ide hard drives. For commercial use I only buy Maxtor, although the new Seagates now come with a 5 year warranty, double check that you are buying a drive with that warranty. Maxtor may have matched them by now, last I checked they were at 3 years. That's an impressive warranty, and will easily match the useful life of the machine.

Sata drives are slightly faster, but only of course if you get a SATA supporting motherboard. However, the current SATA 1 that is being used runs off the same pci bus as your other pci components if I remember right, your ide drives have a separate subsystem. SATA 2 will correct this issue I believe, but I'm not positive.

SATA is fast though. But a good 7200 rpm ide large cache [old was about 2mB cache, new is around 8 mB cache] will be very fast, and very stable.

All depends on what you want.

By the way, linux has problems writing to ntfs, not reading it, so if you want to share data internally you'd want to have your main windows partition contain all your non data stuff [about 10 gig or so], OS, programs etc, and then have a second partition containing your data. The OS I'd format in NTFS, which offers some security, and the data in FAT32, which allows linux to easily read and write to it.

On the linux disk, I'd recommend creating a few extra partitions, make each about 5 gigabytes, so you can test run different distributions. Make the first 2 partitions each about 5 gig, format in reiserfs, the third be an extended partition, inside that make the first be 500mB, that's the linux swap partition, then you can divide the rest in half, most linux distros default to having 3 partitions, /, /home, and /swap, and it's tricky to get them to share a home one.

Home is where all your user specific data lives, it's about comparable to the 'Documents and Settings' folder in windows 2K/XP.

By the way, I finally got around to installing mepis on my test box. This is a really fast distro, it's much faster than my Yoper, which claims to be highly optimized for speed. It starts up very fast, much faster than windows.

I'll post a review of it, main complaint is that it comes with everything and the kitchen sink, which means it's ready to go, except for one really bizarre glitch, open office doesn't work?? Hard to believe they let that out the door with that problem, amazing.

But everything else works, it even comes with real player, the real one, installed, firefox 1.0 is only an apt-get install firefox away.

It claims to support dialup, but I'm not sure. I was at the flea m arket yesterday and saw this older device that looked like it took a modem connection and turned it into an ethernet one, I'm not sure how it worked, but I've seen that feature before on some routers too. It's a lot easier working with linux if you can do it through ethernet.
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Thanks, jeff. That's EXACTLY what I need to know. This mobo is 2.5 years old now, so we know where that leads.

I'll buy the Maxtor IDE 7200 8mb cache. It's only about $50.

And I'll get back with you later on the drives/partitions etc.

Edit: nope, this is the 2 year old box. I haven't got things cleaned up enough upstairs to start on a "new" box yet. And ethernet shouldn't be a problem....
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Oh, I made a pretty serious mis-statement here:



It's the complete opposite, /home was around I'd bet maybe 20 years before documents and settings was, so the correct way to say this is:

The documents and settings folder is how microsoft implemented the standard /home directory from unix type systems. And by the way, you can move that to other partitions, you can move any directory to any partition, except the root / one that is.
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