Buying a 1.5TB Hard Drive

Posted by Jacob Santos on December 31, 2008

I’m going to go for it. I’m going to spend $130 on a 1.5TB hard drive. I’m also going to use it to install Windows. Create an partition on it around 150 GB for Windows and another for other files. I think the problem will be eventually that I’ll have to reinstall Windows Vista and lose all my installed applications. However, I might have to activate Windows again and hopefully I’m not at the limit where I have to call Microsoft. It might be better to keep it as it is and just repartition the drive it is on now and add the remaining 20 GB to the existing primary hard drive.

The goal was to always buy a new hard drive to replace the current ones. The current ones are fairly old and I’m afraid they might die any moment now. I should have a slot open for plugging the new hard drive in, but it will require that I move vast qualities of the other hard drives to make room. It will also be cool to get rid of several hard drives.

So basically, with 1.5TB after formatting, I should still have around 1.2TB and 1.4TB. I’ll be able to move all of my existing hard drives over to it and then recycle them. I think I will install Vista on it after all. It will allow me to rid myself of all of the extra hard drives that are nearing their end of life. Also with one hard drive, the system won’t be as cramped and the air flow should be improved. Also I have one hard drive right up on a memory module and I’m afraid that the wires are damaging the memory module.

So with the new hard drive, I’m going to have three parititions.

  1. 160 GB – OS and Programs
  2. 120 GB – Documents and Development and Misc
  3. 1000-1220 GB – Videos and existing files (eventually, I’m going to have the PVR recorded on here).

I don’t like the idea of losing my music, so it would be nice to back it up to a DVD, but DVDs only last so long, and I’ll probably forget to create another one. I think also that the backup of my iTunes music and other files should last along with the new hard drive until I can build the File Server.

The good news is that I’m expecting that the total space on that will be 6 TB to 9 TB. That should be well enough space to last for upwards to 5 to 10 years. Well, the awesome news is that I won’t need to mirror the hard drives either, because I can allow Windows to manage the files for me. Depending on the total capacity, I might go for mirroring just to be sure that I have redundancy in place for my files.

It will be difficult to buy a hard drive less than 500 to 750 GB in the future. Or at least, it would make a really good PC with a lot of capacity for cheap. I still need to revisit what it would cost, if I built my gaming PC and File Server today.

I’ll most likely be buying the hard drive next week, because I’ll be moving soon, and if I don’t send off for it next week, I’ll probably won’t receive it in time. It might be a good idea to hold off for another month because the new place is going to require a deposit and I’m just basically hoping to get the deposit from my current apartment. I should, but I also don’t know what the deposit is going to be at the new place. I also have to pay a lot of bills next week, so if I have the $130 dollars next week, then I’m going for it, if I don’t, then I’ll be buying it in February.

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5 Comments.

  1. Lorelle January 2, 2009 at 6:04 pm

    I remember when I partitioned my first portable drive, so thrilled I could keep all my music, multimedia, and backups on one. Ah, such a long time ago. The last biggie portable drive was a gift from my husband almost two years ago, 750 gigs, better than flowers for this geeky girl.

    I’m now up to 5 portable drives ranging from 80-750 with a multi-tera in my future, too. I’ve filled them all up, so now I have one drive for music and books (years worth of audio and text downloads), another for multimedia (movies, tv shows, and work videos), another for photographs, and others for backups and all the rest of the crap that fills up my computers constantly. I am famous for filling up hard drives. :D

    I love my portables, but they aren’t all very portable. When I lighted my load for travel, I also gve up hauling the bigger, heavier portables, especially those with the big electrical bricks, for a smaller, lighter portable. So my next major drive purchase is going to be the biggest AND lightest portable I can find. Oh, I love those.

    My husband got me a 22" wide screen monitor for the holidays, and my gift to myself is a dual monitor adapter that will allow me to use my old monitor, plus my laptop, so I’ll have three monitors, ranging from small laptop to 22" wide. Such a geek I is! We is. :D

    • Jacob Santos January 4, 2009 at 12:35 am

      I too have a portable, however it suffers from corruptions and it didn’t really help having it so close to the bass for the speakers. It is 2 TB (4 500GB).

      Solid State Hard drives will eventually make portables with larger capacities and less likely to crash and burn when you drop them. However, I don’t like how flash drives tend to lose their polarity over time. If you tend to drop a file on a flash drive and then forget about it in two or three years, then that file may no longer exist.

      I have dual monitors, I’d say it was worth it.

  2. Shaun Lawson January 5, 2009 at 1:44 pm

    So how are the servers coming? I haven’t heard anything in a while.

    • Jacob Santos January 5, 2009 at 9:21 pm

      I know, I want to talk to you guys, but you’re never on AIM. I need to talk to you.

      I’m building a game engine that I’m going to rewrite the games browser games. Should hopefully be done or partially done by the end of this month.

  3. ROAR January 10, 2009 at 12:32 am

    Windows. Home. Server.