[COLUG] Upgraded Hardware - Foreseeable Problems?

[Brian Miller]

On Sunday 04 February 2007 7:34 am, Stephen P. Molnar, Ph.D. wrote:
> The motherboard only has one PCI slot for a master and a slave.  My current
> linux box has 3 HD's, but I'm prepared to give one up (keep it as a spare
> for my Win XP machine).
I presume you meant a single IDE connector on the motherboard.

> There are 4 SATA connections, but I know nothing 
> about them.  I presume that any hard drive connected to one of those must
> be a SATA HD, or is there some sort of adapter?  Also, what about DC/DVD
> drive how would that be connected?  I have an old CD drive on the linux box
> now, but am willing to upgrade it to a DVD.

I am unaware of any IDE/SATA converters.  You should be able to attach your 
current CD to the IDE connector.  But rather then piece together an upgrade, 
I would recommend you just purchase a new system with all new hard drives.  
Then just copy all of the files from the old system to the new.  Hard drives 
are one of those items that tend to break more often in computers, since they 
have moving parts.  (The other common item is the power supply, which if you 
upgrade your current system, you will also most likely be keeping.)  Also, by 
migrating everything to a new system, you still have all of the data on the 
old hardware, just in case the new OS install and/or data copy doesn't work 
right (say, a power failure right at a critical moment that causes a file 
system on the new hard drive to become corrupted.  

There have also been some advances in the file system code, which will improve 
file access, that you won't get if you update the OS on your existing disks 
and file systems.  The SATA drives are suppose to provide better performance 
over IDE (I haven't done any performance testing to personally verify this, 
though.)  Some newer PC class systems provide for a hardware RAID on some of 
the SATA drives, which gives you added reliability over using your old IDE 
drives (although at a higher cost).

Ask around for someone who will sell you a PC that is certified for Linux, 
that doesn't have Windows already pre-installed.  That should save you some 
money.

>
> Sorry to have asked so many low level questions, but, as I said, I'm not a
> hardware person.

That's why we're here.

Brian