Very Computer

Hi,

This week, CompUSA has a Western Digital 80 GB Caviar hard drive with 8MB
cache on sale for $100 after the rebates and am thinking to purchase a unit
to run Linux on it. I am wondering if anyone has ever tried to install
Linux on this beast and would like to make some comments if the drive works
on Linux and perhaps its performance as well.

TIA.

Quote:> Hi,

> This week, CompUSA has a Western Digital 80 GB Caviar hard drive with
> 8MB cache on sale for $100 after the rebates and am thinking to purchase
> a unit to run Linux on it. I am wondering if anyone has ever tried to
> install Linux on this beast and would like to make some comments if the
> drive works on Linux and perhaps its performance as well.

> TIA.

Great drive, it's the fastest IDE drive made. Works fine with Linux.

Quote:> Hi,

> This week, CompUSA has a Western Digital 80 GB Caviar hard drive with 8MB
> cache on sale for $100 after the rebates and am thinking to purchase a
> unit to run Linux on it. I am wondering if anyone has ever tried to
> install Linux on this beast and would like to make some comments if the
> drive works on Linux and perhaps its performance as well.

> TIA.

You're much more likely to have trouble with your bios, if anything.

I didn't see the 80GB/8M for sale, but I did see the 120GB/8MB for
$150 after rebates. I allocated 512MB for swap in the first partition,
and the rest as a single linux partition, then formatted it reiserfs.
Using a the RIP boot CD, I used midnight commander (mc) to copy
everything over, preserving links (first tried using tar, but
softlinks were copied as files). Then I reconnected the 120GB as hda,
rebooted with the RIP cd, and re-ran LILO. Works great!

I've only been running it a couple of days, but it is very quiet. I
adjusted it for best speed by setting the acoustic management to 254
(marginally faster, and I heard no more noise). The only slight
drawback so far is that the drive runs much hotter than my previous
5400RPM Maxtor (as expected). I've needed no extra cooling for it, but
I wouldn't recommend blocking air flow by installing another drive
right over the WD in the 3.5 drive cage!

Oh, my system: Mandrake 8.2, Abit BH6 v1.1 motherboard, PIII-600
overclocked to 800Mhz for the 133Mhz FSB.

Quote:> Hi,

> This week, CompUSA has a Western Digital 80 GB Caviar hard drive with 8MB
> cache on sale for $100 after the rebates and am thinking to purchase a unit
> to run Linux on it. I am wondering if anyone has ever tried to install
> Linux on this beast and would like to make some comments if the drive works
> on Linux and perhaps its performance as well.

> TIA.

--
http://www.bigfoot.com/~brihall
Linux Consultant

Inertia makes the world go round.

Quote:> I didn't see the 80GB/8M for sale, but I did see the 120GB/8MB for $150
> after rebates. I allocated 512MB for swap in the first partition, and
> the rest as a single linux partition, then formatted it reiserfs. Using
> a the RIP boot CD, I used midnight commander (mc) to copy everything
> over, preserving links (first tried using tar, but softlinks were copied
> as files). Then I reconnected the 120GB as hda, rebooted with the RIP
> cd, and re-ran LILO. Works great!

One comment, your life will be much easier if you keep / on a separate
partition from everything else. If you keep / separated from all of your
user data and programs you can always do a clean install when you upgrade
your OS. You should at lease create separate / and /home partitions, on a
drive taht big I'd also create a separate /usr/local. If you don't want
to allocate /usr/local separately you should mkdir /home/usr/local and
/home/opt and the replace /usr/local and /opt sith soft links to
/home/usr/local and /home/opt.

I'm sorry, I don't agree. I used to use separte partitions for my
linux installs, but now I believe that to just be a waste of time and
disk space. Typically when I upgrade the OS (maybe every other
Mandrake release or so), I wipe the drive to remove any accumlated
'cruft' of stuff I've installed and forgetten about, and then restore
from backup. Partitioning on workstations is really a matter of
personal preference, IMHO.

--
http://www.bigfoot.com/~brihall
Linux Consultant

Inertia makes the world go round.