Re: HD Deep clean?
 

My OEM drive had the Seagate logo on it, so it was easy to tell ;)

My Maxtor drive I bought myself, so I knew what I was getting :D

The number of HDDs you can put in your PC is restricted by the physical space inside your case (my first case only had enough room for one HDD) :(
and also how many devices you have connectd to your IDE cables, ie CD-Rom, DVD drive, etc... - unless you're using SCSI in which case you can up to 15 HDDs chained together, iirc.

Hope that helps :)

Re: HD Deep clean?
 

Good advice....

P.S. Dont forget it can be up to 31 with scsi III

Re: HD Deep clean?
 

OK my case has two SATA 7200 80Gb HDDs and a CD RW and a DVD RW.

How many devices can you connecto to an IDE cable? Am I right in thinking that SATA must be connected to an IDE cable not a SCSI cable?

Oh and an FDD. The case is a mid tower sized (Nokia 8850 4-Bay ATX Tower Case with 450W Power Supply), I'm pretty sure there is room for some more HDDs in it.

Re: HD Deep clean?
 

SATA goes to its own connector on the motherboard and nothing to do with any IDE or SCSI connections. If you have SATA and ide on a board then you could connect 8 devices. 4 hdd's on the SATA in stipe+mirror mode ( if raid is available ) and 4 on the ide !

Re: HD Deep clean?
 

Thanks, so I can get myself another identical HDD and a, say 100Gb HDD put the Idenitcal one on the SATA and RAID5 (instead of the current 0) should reduce the mean time to failiure and mean I can be more lazy about backups.

The 100Gb can be used for backup, put in the other PC as a storage device etc.

I imagine this will mean a complete reinstall of the OS and rebuild?

Re: HD Deep clean?
 

Actually I wouldn't mind knowing how to irreversibly remove data from HDD's, I have three 40 gig drives I want to sell on ebay, they had all sorts of bits on like my Internet Banking details, FTP addresses/passwords for work etc. I know you can un-fdisk and un-format and retrieve all manner of deleted files quite easily so I wouldn't mind finding something to wipe it all permenantly

Re: HD Deep clean?
 

As far as I am aware you cant have raid 5 on SATA.... I thought that it was a SCSI only thing...

Perhaps you mean 0+1 or stripe+mirror - this uses 4 identical drives.

Re: HD Deep clean?
 

Raid 5 is available on SATA. In fact, there are LOADS of cards that offer it.

e.g. http://www.gamers-depot.com/hardware...t/1540/002.htm

Re: HD Deep clean?
 

The only way to realistically remove all data is to write the entire disk with 1's and 0's and do this at least three times to remove all magnetic traces of the data that are left. Once would be enough to stop the average person from accessing any data but not enough to stop the determined chap who knows what he is doing.

Re: HD Deep clean?
 

Well you learn something new every day !!!!

Do you need 5 drives using 1 for parity as you do on scsi ?

Edit - hmmmm only 4 drives on the card you linked to... How do you run raid 5 ???

Re: HD Deep clean?
 

What would I use to do that? Bear in mind the drives are all by different manufacturers.

Re: HD Deep clean?
 

Raid 5 can be implemented with 3 disks, two data disks and a parity disk (effectivly)

Re: HD Deep clean?
 

Cant see the point in that myself :)

Re: HD Deep clean?
 

There are a number of commercially available programs that can do this, many with an evaluation period which is all you need to wipe the drives ready for resale. Do a google search on wiping all information from hard drives. You can write a batch file to do this for you but this normally leaves a few areas unwiped.

Re: HD Deep clean?
 

What would you recommend then? 0+1 has a 50% greater overhead, mirroring a 0 requires another pair of HDDs.

Or would you recommned I just get another 160Gb HDD and use that for more data and backup, leaving the current R0 as is, sounds a lot easier.

I probably have about 70Gb of files on the PC that need backing up as they are not stored elswehere or would be annoying to recreate (in the case of the iTunes MyMusic folder). Video is stored on the original tapes and edited footage is also streamed back to tape as the space is cheap.

Pity camcorders won't allow you to send data to a tape. Would be a great backup device.