Hi, Brenton.

I *need* to get a big fat hard disk and I'd appreciate your input.

A local bloke reckoned last month that he'd have 2G IDE in around now
for something like $500 and I could just do that and replace one of the
213M ones. But should I?

 1. $s are a constraint.

 2. I don't particularly want to update the motherboard at this stage,
    and this m/b doesn't have any high speed slots except what appear
    to be proprietary ones which I bet you couldn't get anything to fit
    now.

 3. Capacity is the prime consideration, but faster would be nice.

 4. If I just do that, do I need a driver (I would think so) to access
    something that big. Presumably if so one comes with the drive.

 5. If I need a driver, can the new disk be my boot disk. I don't
    really see how. Maybe it doesn't matter, 'cos I'd keep the other
    213M in there.

 6. What if the BIOS supports LBA, and how do I find out if it does.

OK, now some alternatives.

 7. Should I consider SCSI. He also expected to have similar capacity
    SCSI but tried to talk me out of that because I wouldn't get much
    speed with this m/b. But capacity is more important to me at this
    stage.

 8. OK so I need a SCSI card. Any idea of current $ for those?

 9. If in due course I do upgrade the m/b, can I expect to just replace
    the SCSI card with "fast wide" (or whatever the latest technology
    is by then), while still keeping the drive.

10. With such a big one I'd want to be able to back it up. My 40Meg
    tapes running off the floppy controller aren't really the go for
    that. Speed or capacity. I'd like to think of something like a 2G
    or 4G DAT. Is that another point in favour of SCSI? Any idea of $?

11. One day I'd like to replace this crappy CD-ROM with a 6x. Is that
    another argument for SCSI? $? Will it / does it need to work with
    my PAS16 sound card (which runs the current one).

And finally...

12. What are the answers to the questions I *haven't* asked? :-)

I'd like to move soon. Tonight I decided to see how easy it was to
whip up a report using Delphi's ReportSmith from some of my work
databases. Didn't work, 'cos all of ReportSmith is zipped into a
3meg ZIP file, and there's only 86k (yes, k!) spare on the D: drive.
:-(

Regards, FIM.

 * * Proposed NEW tax will pay the tax on the tax, supposedly.
@EOT:

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