1T hard drive on sale $90: a good deal?

[CNYCacher]

So, when are they going to have a laptop PATA version?  Maybe then I can convince the Debian installer developers that defaulting to a 5G /usr partition on a >100G drive is kinda silly.

Besides, in a slim form factor, you could make them in pre-stacked pairs for a standard bay in a desktop, with a built-in RAID controller to mirror them.

(I still don't know why Debian in particular works fine if I let it decide the partitions, but always fails to work right if I partition manually.  I've done it manually for plenty of other distros, but Debian always seems to have a major problem with at least one of the partitions.)

5G seems pretty big.  /usr expands with the amount of packages you install, not the amount of files you save.  I don't see where it makes sense to size it to a certain percentage of disk space.

[Cromlech]

I'm too lazy to make any partitions. I use the brute force approach of using separate drives for everything on my main rig.
74GB Raptor for XP Pro x64
74GB Raptor for Vista Ultimate x64
750GB Seagate for Games
750GB Seagate for 'immediate' Storage (video projects and downloads)

2TB Western Digital Studio II for my CD collection backup, and everything else under the sun.

I'm using my notebook as my primary web machine at the moment though.

[KD5NRH]

5G seems pretty big.  /usr expands with the amount of packages you install, not the amount of files you save.  I don't see where it makes sense to size it to a certain percentage of disk space.

/dev/hda5              4806904   3747512    815208  83% /usr

I just installed on this machine last week.  Granted, I've got most of the stuff from the current distro that I plan to use, but there are a few other things I'll probably be doing from source later.

10G would probably never fill up for 99% of users, but remember that a lot of different things go into /usr/*.  [/usr/src|/usr/local/src] alone can get huge.

[BryanP]

Hard to imagine that my first PC that I owned only had a 540 MB hard drive and 32 Meg of RAM.

48K of ram and a floppy drive.

My first hard drive was a 40MB Seagate ST157A.  That drive cost me more than the last PC I bought.

[Nitrogen]

48K of ram and a floppy drive.

My first hard drive was a 40MB Seagate ST157A.  That drive cost me more than the last PC I bought.

I still miss the noises those drives made.  They sounded really IMPORTANT!

Hard drives nowadays just click.  Nowhere near as cool.

[lee n. field]

Hard drives nowadays just click.  Nowhere near as cool.

Sometimes they clunk.  Sometimes they go tick-tick-tick.  Sometimes they go "twanggggg!".  Sometimes they go into a wind-up, wind-down, wind-up, wind-down cycle.

[Thor]

Mine had 512k of ram and a cassette tape drive.

And you were in constant peril of mistaking a tape of your BASIC programs for a music tape and sticking it in your Walkman.

SCREEEEEEEEEYYYAAOOOOOXXXZZZZZZZZBBUUUSSSSSSBBBEEEEEEEEEEEESCRAAWWWWWWWWWW...!

I remember those days. The very first PC I ever played with was a Heathkit homebuilt jobber that had 65K RAM, a monochrome screen, and cassette tape drives. I learned BASIC pretty quick, as I would change the parameters of a couple of games as to make it too hard to win, too hard to lose, or whatever tripped my trigger that day. I can safely say that I'm almost a "plank owner" of the Home Computer generation.

[CNYCacher]

/dev/hda5              4806904   3747512    815208  83% /usr

I just installed on this machine last week.  Granted, I've got most of the stuff from the current distro that I plan to use, but there are a few other things I'll probably be doing from source later.

10G would probably never fill up for 99% of users, but remember that a lot of different things go into /usr/*.  [/usr/src|/usr/local/src] alone can get huge.

use -h, human!  
 
Okay, so you are a little over 3.5GB already.  My own install is right at 3GB.  Baseline includes a lot of stuff like your desktop env, etc.  Those last 1.5 - 2GB fill up more slowly.

PROTIP: If you are installing a lot of stuff from source, make a /usr/local it's own partition and always ./configure --prefix=/usr/local  If you bork something you can restore system to stock by unmounting /usr/local/

Sometimes they clunk.  Sometimes they go tick-tick-tick.  Sometimes they go "twanggggg!".  Sometimes they go into a wind-up, wind-down, wind-up, wind-down cycle.

We are no longer the hard drives who say "click".  We are now know ans the hard drives who say "Ickyicky icky ptang ptang whoooep bwooooow"

[Nitrogen]

REAL HUMANS use ZFS and can add storage on the fly.

[BrokenPaw]

Timex Sinclair ZX-81.  1k of memory with outboard 16k expansion module.  Membrane keyboard.  Headphone jacks for to connect your own tape recorder, whereupon to save your programs.

My parents bought me that to see if my interest in computers was passing, or long-term.  Once they surgically removed me from the thing, they bought me an IBM PC.  4.77MHz 8088.  256K. Two double-sided floppy drives (360k each).  If Jean-Luc Picard had existed back then, I'd have felt like him.

My first hard disk was a Seagate ST-225.  20 megs of MFM, stepper-motor goodness.  There was no way I'd ever fill it up.

-BP

[roo_ster]

My first hard disk was a Seagate ST-225.  20 megs of MFM, stepper-motor goodness.  There was no way I'd ever fill it up.

...with just one Powerpoint briefing.

[Harold Tuttle]

1980's Daffinition

10 meg harddrive:
The quickest way to loose 10 megs of data with one failure.

[Balog]

Seagate 1.5T external at NewEgg for $199 while supplies last.

http://www.newegg.com/Special/ShellShocker.aspx

[KD5NRH]

Okay, so you are a little over 3.5GB already.  My own install is right at 3GB.  Baseline includes a lot of stuff like your desktop env, etc.  Those last 1.5 - 2GB fill up more slowly.

Actually, after I posted, I noticed that I didn't have anything in */src yet.  That's a laptop, I'll probably be working up a new kernel for it and its predecessor soon, (since most of the hardware isn't changeable, no point in having support for things that will never be there, and things that are always there might as well be compiled in rather than modules) and that can end up taking a lot more space.  I'm also starting to lean towards my old tactics of debugging (read as "find the otherwise irrelevant routine that's causing an error and comment it out, then recompile") certain things, which will result in a lot more source hanging around.

[Brad Johnson]

Speaking of deals, I just hopped on their Dell Store page and they have some screaming deals on refurbs at the moment.  Refurb'd 20" Ultrasharps for $179.  Looks like they have about 50 in stock.  Non-Ultrasharp 17's for as little as $100.

Looks to be some pretty good deals on CPUs, too.

http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/desktops?c=us&cs=22&l=en&s=dfh

Brad

[Balog]

Browsing that Dell outlet..... on some of those gaming rigs, they want $2k for a refurbished!! How much did they cost new......

[Gewehr98]

Factory overclocked, liquid cooled Dell XPS gaming units bring a pretty penny when new.

This one went for $7,129.00 when new:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2156657,00.asp

[Balog]

Sweet merciful crap that's a spendy computer.

[zahc]

REAL HUMANS use ZFS and can add storage on the fly.

REAL humans use LVM and then can add storage on the fly while using any old file system they want.

[Manedwolf]

Factory overclocked, liquid cooled Dell XPS gaming units bring a pretty penny when new.

This one went for $7,129.00 when new:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2156657,00.asp

And they depreciate faster than a Ford Taurus.

[Cromlech]

Oh, for sure. I've been known to hop onto various custom PC sites, as well as the Mac Pro configurator, and spec a £15,000 rig. It won't really be any more powerful than a £2-3000 rig, and you can definitely watch the value of it drop every week!

[roo_ster]

REAL humans use LVM and then can add storage on the fly while using any old file system they want.

Ouch.