if you're like me you'll buy a new drive every three years or so, all of which will cost the same amount and each of which is so much bigger than the previous one that it's not worth running the previous one alongside it.

I never really responded to this, so I will. You're right about much of this. Every time we add the latest sized hard disk to our systems it seems pointless to keep the others around because they're dwarfed by the new ones. But I keep mine. I'm not sure exactly why. I think it's connected to my dislike for combining drives into larger partitions. I keep one partition per drive, and use it for a purpose. For example, here's the drives I have in my system in the order they found their way in (all the following are Western Digital drives - I just like them):

25GB 5400RPM - spare drive for Tivo extraction. A good size for extracting and converting around 4 to 6 shows before putting them in a more permanent location.

100GB 7200RPM - first drive I ever added to a system. at that point I used it for all additional files (downloads, Outlook store, web sites). I still do.

80GB 7200RPM 8MB buffer - OS drive. Yeah, it's the third drive I've owned. The 25GB drive used to be the OS drive.

250GB 7200RPM 8MB buffer SATA - TV shows. Yup, that's all. I have this thing next to full with 220GB of TV shows, and around 20GB of torrents in progress. This doesn't even include the additional 15 or so DVDR's that also have TV shows on them.


So Peter, you make sense, but I don't think I follow the same behaviour. This is just about every hard drive that I've obtained so far, and I just kept adding them to each other. That's where my noise issue is coming from. Those first two drives are pretty loud, especially the 25GB. I'd like to get them into a seperate box.

I suspect I'll need to simply add and add, as I've become quite addicted to Bittorrent, which sucks up storage space at an incredible rate