HDD Upgrade

[Jon H]

My 40Gb hard disk is 75% full now, so it's being upgraded to a new 250Gb one.

I was just wandering how much of an impact this will have (good or bad) on the performance of fs9. Everything will be coppied to the new drive, and the old one used for back up.

[GunnerMan]

Depends on what kind of drive. Some will dispute but many people don't like to go over 160 GB or so in HDD size just because the seek times get bigger. Im guessing you wont see much of a performance gain unless you get a beter HDD that has better seek times and is SATA or something. Make sure you do a defrag once a week and you should be fine.

[congo]

HDD's are the least significant hardware when it comes to performance, the load times will be influenced and that's all. Load times include ingame load times as well. I would get a 320gb drive as they are pretty cheap now and they should be faster than a 250gb drive.

I always thought that larger drives are faster, particularly because your data fits into the first half (the fastest half) of the drive easier and so the drive is seeking very fast on the relatively small amount of data on the drive. But I'm not certain of this. I just know my 250gb drives were faster than my 160gb drives.

[NicksFXHouse]

It

[Jon H]

Thanks for the replies.

I've already got the new drive, it's a Maxtor Diamondmax 10 250GB 7200rpm, link.

I haven't installed it yet as I'm not quite sure how to go about it. I'd have thaught it'd be a simple job of screwing it down and pluging it in, however the MESH case I have seems to try and make things difficult.

The HDDs are fixed in a caddy that slides out, and the screw holes for the first drive (the one that's already there) look pretty conventional - two in each side. The space for an additional disk is completely different.
On one side there are two large holes fitted with rubber grommets that have small metal insert. On the other side the grommets are fitted into the BOTTOM of the caddy.
The holes match up with those on the drive, but it just seems silly to have two completely different methods of fixing the same thing. You'd also need to use 6mm or 8mm screws here, as normal 4mm ones are too short to go through the grommets.

After an e-mail to MESH I received a pair of brackets that seem to fit to either side of the HDD but not to any part of the case.



Here are some photos to show you what I'm talking about;

The caddy fitted in the computer case


The caddy out of tha case, showing the two fixing methods


A close up of the grommets on the side (near) and bottom of the caddy


The brackets as supplied by MESH, free of charge but apparently useless



Is this unusual, or have I missed something completely? I would very much appreciate your advice on this one.


Jon

[cheesegrater]

My thoughts:

If I am not mistaken the brackets are used for mounting the drives into the case without screwing the drives into the case. You attach the brackets to the hard drive through screws, then you put the hard drive into the caddy, and it is supposed to lock in. Apparently some people change drives a lot, and like this sort of thing.

It looks like it might work. Try fitting the brackets to sides of the caddy to see if it will. Although, it lookes like the hard drive might stick out of the caddy. Those brackets migh be for CD-ROM drives, and not hard drives, or for a different case. Who knows. The caddy looks really bizzare too.

An alternative is to transfer all your files to your new drive and then put the new hard drive where the old one used to be.

You could try to attach the drive by screws on one side of the caddy. As long as the drive rests on the caddy and isn't suspended in the air through the screws it should be okay, as long as you don't go to LAN parties. Although, I don't know if it would be safe attached through the rubber. This looks kinda risky. Also, it looks like the screws on the bottom of the caddy might get in the way. This caddy is really bizzare.

I hope somone else knows something.

[Jon H]

Yes, the brackets fit to the sides of the drive, but they don't fit into the caddy in any way, and besides they then make the drive too wide to slide in.
Thanks anyway, I've now sent ANOTHER e-mail to MESH asking foe help.

I hope somone else knows something.

So do I...

Cheers

[congo]

What's all that dust, asbestos?