computer hard drive size, how big?

[Moparal]

I am building my new computer when I get home and was curious of how many members had computers with 1000 plus gigabites for a hard drive and if you have memory over 800 megs?

My mother board takes 6 tarabits of hard drive and 8 gigs of 800 meg memory. it is a 32/64 bit board with major options. Or atleast to me. I am not really a computer geek, but never checked out the potential of my system.

I don't really need a system this big, but since im a big block type of person, I thought i'd finish up the build on my system.  This is just for a pass time hobby.
 I forget all of the details about my system but I have been only useing like 650 gigs of hard drive and 2gigs of 633 ddr2 memory. The processor now was only a am2 dual core 3.1 mghz processor.

I figure stepping up will help multi tasking issue even better.  I actually don't need the big hard drive, but the price is decent. I can't remember the video card type or size, but it is good for streaming and gaming.

[duodec]

Are you running Vista or XP?  If Vista go for as much memory as you can afford, but at least 4GB.  You can get by with 2.5 - 3GB but its a compromise.

If you are running XP then 2GB is generally plenty; you won't get as much benefit out of more (though it won't hurt).  Linux will usually be fine with 1.5GB, but will also make great use of as much memory as you give it.

Check your motherboard docs for interleaving info; I'm out of touch on wintel boards, but some will give improved memory performance if you fill more banks with the identical DIMMs.  Some servers we use would do two way or four way interleaving with two or four DIMMs installed in the correct slots.  Make sure you have the newest motherboard firmware/BIOS and drivers too.

For disk space...really only you can answer that.  How much space do you need?  Are you going to increase usage by loading on media (movies, etc) or go nuts with ultra-high resolution pictures?

But also.... how are you going to back it up?  Losing a hard drive can hurt.  Losing a 1.5 Terabyte full of movies and pics that you never backed up... well, that would be really special.  So don't get more space than you are willing to get some backup resource for.  Personally I use tape _and_ external drives, with the tapes getting rotated to my work desk once a week.  I have never lost data in 28 years of computer use (I ascribe a lot of that to not ever willingly using Microsoft products, but thats just me ; ). 

Tape drives are expensive though, and drives/media big enough to back up big disks add up fast.  External hard drives are not always the best way to back up; its far too easy for a compromised system (Windows again...) or just a malfunctioning one to crap all over it; that has happened to a few of our customers (luckily data was also on their servers so no loss except lots of time).  That same reason means running mirrored drives is not a panacea; it can save you from a hardware failure, but it won't stop the OS or malware from crapping all over both copies of your data.

We have purchased Seagate drives from Global Computers but this is not a specific vendor recommendation.  They have 1.0 and 1.5 terabyte SATA "3G" drives by Seagate available for < $150.  You may be able to find them cheaper.  These are 7200RPM drives, pretty much baseline these days for PCs.  Make sure you get drives with the most current firmware.  You can get external drives everywhere for backup/archiving... at work our best luck has been with Seagate, worst with Western Digital.  All our usage has been with USB2 (good) or Firewire (better); there's also E-SATA, but I don't know anything about it other than performance is supposed to be good.

If you want better performance you could consider Western Digital "Velociraptor" internal drives.  They will cost quite a bit more, and hold less than the normal PC drives, but they use 10,000 RPM SCSI server drive mechanisms with a PC SATA interface.  They will be relatively noisy.  And they may not make a lot of difference to you; it really depends on your usage and the OS you use.  On a server they kick butt.

Sorry, I tend to babble on technoweenie things.  My home systems are not wintels (or Macs), run U-320 SCSI with high capacity DAT tape drives and a detached NAS disk box for backup.

[Moparal]

The hard drives I have/ or waiting on me at home are 10,000 rpm sata. I have 6 sata plugs. Each accepts a tara bit.  I was installing Vista this time.  The memory is all matched and has 6 240 pin slots.  Each slot takes 2 gigs. I bought all compatibable stuff that the reference book said to use. As I use 1 hard drive, it is also copied on a seperate drive.   I have trouble saying what I have as in the same way I can't talk small block chevy talk.     But I do read what I need and how to update whate I have.

To me, the hardest thing to do is install all of my programs. It takes forever. Since everything has to have all the updates installed with the programs. And be restarted often. 

Thanks for your information, I absorb everything I can

[72hemi]

Just an FYI I have 4 gb of ram on my new computer with vista and it runs slower than my old pc with 512 mb and XP. My processor is also a lot faster and between my internal and external harddrives I am running about a terabyte of disk space. If you go Vista I would recommend at least 8 gb of ram, seriously.

[ntstlgl1970]

From what I have read Vista 32 won't recognize anything over 4gb ram but Vista 64 doesn't have as much home user software. When I had my box setup with vista 32, control panel would only show 3gb ram though I have 4 gb, 1gb x 4. Maybe they have fixed this by now and that is no longer true, but I took vista off this box and went back to xp so I am not current on Vista info. I make sure to keep my antivirus up to date, run virus checks often and have my home network behind a hardware firewall/router. It's not bombproof but I feel pretty safe with it.
Duodec has more experience with this stuff than I do and I would heed his concerns regarding the use of internal mirrored drives and a windows based system.

[tactransman]

Are you running Vista or XP?  If Vista go for as much memory as you can afford, but at least 4GB.  You can get by with 2.5 - 3GB but its a compromise.

If you are running XP then 2GB is generally plenty; you won't get as much benefit out of more (though it won't hurt).  Linux will usually be fine with 1.5GB, but will also make great use of as much memory as you give it.

Check your motherboard docs for interleaving info; I'm out of touch on wintel boards, but some will give improved memory performance if you fill more banks with the identical DIMMs.  Some servers we use would do two way or four way interleaving with two or four DIMMs installed in the correct slots.  Make sure you have the newest motherboard firmware/BIOS and drivers too.

For disk space...really only you can answer that.  How much space do you need?  Are you going to increase usage by loading on media (movies, etc) or go nuts with ultra-high resolution pictures?

But also.... how are you going to back it up?  Losing a hard drive can hurt.  Losing a 1.5 Terabyte full of movies and pics that you never backed up... well, that would be really special.  So don't get more space than you are willing to get some backup resource for.  Personally I use tape _and_ external drives, with the tapes getting rotated to my work desk once a week.  I have never lost data in 28 years of computer use (I ascribe a lot of that to not ever willingly using Microsoft products, but thats just me ; ). 

Tape drives are expensive though, and drives/media big enough to back up big disks add up fast.  External hard drives are not always the best way to back up; its far too easy for a compromised system (Windows again...) or just a malfunctioning one to crap all over it; that has happened to a few of our customers (luckily data was also on their servers so no loss except lots of time).  That same reason means running mirrored drives is not a panacea; it can save you from a hardware failure, but it won't stop the OS or malware from crapping all over both copies of your data.

We have purchased Seagate drives from Global Computers but this is not a specific vendor recommendation.  They have 1.0 and 1.5 terabyte SATA "3G" drives by Seagate available for < $150.  You may be able to find them cheaper.  These are 7200RPM drives, pretty much baseline these days for PCs.  Make sure you get drives with the most current firmware.  You can get external drives everywhere for backup/archiving... at work our best luck has been with Seagate, worst with Western Digital.  All our usage has been with USB2 (good) or Firewire (better); there's also E-SATA, but I don't know anything about it other than performance is supposed to be good.

If you want better performance you could consider Western Digital "Velociraptor" internal drives.  They will cost quite a bit more, and hold less than the normal PC drives, but they use 10,000 RPM SCSI server drive mechanisms with a PC SATA interface.  They will be relatively noisy.  And they may not make a lot of difference to you; it really depends on your usage and the OS you use.  On a server they kick butt.

Sorry, I tend to babble on technoweenie things.  My home systems are not wintels (or Macs), run U-320 SCSI with high capacity DAT tape drives and a detached NAS disk box for backup.

 

[duodec]

Moparal,
     I didn't know you already had the memory.  It may still be worth looking through the manual to see if there are interleave options, or either switch or BIOS settings to make the most of it.  Sounds like you're good to go on drives too.  With those it can pay to see if your case came with any kind of insulators or rubber mounts; sometimes they look like strips of heavy plastic tape or strips of rubber that go between the drive and the rails, sometimes they provide thin rubber washers to go between the drive and the screws.  Those drives _can_ be noisy since they really were designed for use in servers.

     It sounds like you are describing a mirror setup; two drives that are kept identical.  Its a good thing to have for hardware reliability but you  seriously need to look at backup too, at least for whatever data you keep on the system.  External drives are a lot better than nothing, especially if you have a couple of them and rotate one out to a safe place on a regular basis.  You can also use a program like Acronis (sp?) to make a backup image of your system that can be restored if (when...) microsoft OS decides its time to go wonky again.  The nice thing about that is if you set up two (or more ) partitions, install all your programs on the primary/system partition but keep all your data, user directories, etc, on the second... when you restore the backup image to your system disk, the data will all still be there and fair odds you won't have to reinstall all your applications.

 

Heh!

I stay as far away from microsoft as I can; unfortunately our customers at work don't, so about 50% of my time is spent trying to make broken, compromised, or user-screwed systems work again.  The rest is spent working with many more customers on non-microsoft systems who take far less time and support effort, run for 2-3 years between reboots, never lose data, never get infected or compromised, never need OS reinstalled (we have multiple systems originally installed in 1993-4 and upgraded in place as needed, many times, no worries, just works).  Its engineering elegance, like Chrysler.  Not hacked together caca like microsoft and chevy.

We do not use or support Vista at this time.  I have no real experience with it beyond what I've read or heard from folks who bought a PC with it; most of them moved back to XP but a few stuck with it.

BTW if you haven't heard MS released an out of band uber-critical internet explorer patch today; this is on top of the critical one released on patch Tuesday.  All versions of IE from 5.x to 8.x are impacted and there are exploits out in the wild on compromised servers (many if not most running microsoft IIS webserver on top of Microsoft SQL Server, surprise, surprise...).  Best update as soon as you can.

Or just run Firefox!  Preferably on something other than windows!

[Moparal]

BTW if you haven't heard MS released an out of band uber-critical internet explorer patch today; this is on top of the critical one released on patch Tuesday.  All versions of IE from 5.x to 8.x are impacted and there are exploits out in the wild on compromised servers (many if not most running microsoft IIS webserver on top of Microsoft SQL Server, surprise, surprise...).  Best update as soon as you can.


I did this update last night on my laptop in the motel. I usually run multi hd's striped and mirror. And run multiple Op systems.  I also have tape drive back up.  My manual showed me how to set the memory up and what type and brand and how to do the drives.  I also run xp on the same computer.  Depends on which disc I boot up on.  I just play to pass time. 

Thanks for the info.   When I first started playing with computers, 1 meg was a lot of memory and if you had a 1 gig hard drive, you have it all. I still have windows 3.1 too.   Like I said, I know nothing, I just play. I built the tower myself. Fun on a rainy day. 

[duodec]

Thanks for the info.   When I first started playing with computers, 1 meg was a lot of memory and if you had a 1 gig hard drive, you have it all. I still have windows 3.1 too.   Like I said, I know nothing, I just play. I built the tower myself. Fun on a rainy day. 

Now you're making me feel old.  16 kilobytes RAM, 1.023 MHz processor, attached cassette tape for mass storage was my first.  The 143 kilobyte floppy drive and controller card cost more than I paid for my '71 Challenger _and_ a rebuilt transmission for it in 1980 ; ), and the upgrade to 48 kilobytes of RAM cost ~$200.  Megabytes were for millionaires!  But what a lot of fun back then.  Now its usually too much like work, but sometimes some of the sparkle of getting something new going, or blowing away an old benchmark, or just hearing the sound of those 10 and 15KRPM SCSI drives sequencing up like tiny Formula One engines winding up, and the lights dimming a tiny bit with each startup, opening the window (in winter) to counteract the heat... heh!  Its still fun.

And playing is the best way to learn.  The fact that you have a tape drive for backup sets you above (I'd bet) 98% or more of non commercial desktop users (and a big percentage of those too!)   Bet you know a lot more than you expect  ; )

[71chally416]

I'm behind the times because I still use Win ME. It works good for me (and I happen to have an install disk) but I gave up on using Outlook with it. I use Comcast mail so it's that's no longer an issue. I do like the XP though as my last two bosses had it and I really like the way it works and I have no trouble figuring it out. I've heard nothing but bad things about Vista though. Seems like everybody that uses it wants XP back.