[extropy-chat] when will computers improve?

[David Lubkin]

Robert Bradbury wrote:

>Symantec has bought PowerQwest -- get any of "Drive Image", "Partition Magic"
>or "Drive Copy" as suit your needs -- they aren't that expensive and will
>more than save you the hours of time involved in a system reinstall.  Then
>go to one of the hardware vendors (like Insight) and buy yourself a large
>cheap drive (Insight has 20gb IDE drives for ~$60).  Buy two if you are
>paranoid.  Then install it, use Drive Copy (or one of the other tools)
>to partition it and copy partitions or the entire drive to the spare
>drive.  Then you can either leave it installed or remove it.  If you
>are running Win2K, you can set the drive up so that it powers down
>after N minutes of non-use (saves wear and tear and keeps the case
>cooler).

Good idea.  I've long been annoyed at how expensive tape or optical backup 
solutions are for anyone with hefty storage needs.  And drives are finally 
getting cheaper faster than I can fill them up.  I'm seeing prices more 
like $1/GB for IDE, though.  CDW has 40 GB for your $60, 80 GB for $80, and 
a few honking big drives for under a buck a gig.

Your answer is less useful for my laptop, since external drives are more 
expensive.  But I suppose I could put the disk in a desktop machine and 
backup over the network.  And it's a little more complicated for me, 
because I'm already running two IDE controllers for four drives, and I 
don't have any free slots.

Has anyone had happy experiences with taking an internal drive, putting it 
in an enclosure, and using it as an external drive?


-- David Lubkin.