davidrickard.net

I bought some new hard disks and replaced all my originals. I went from a 500GB drive, two 300GB drives, and a 80GB I used for virtual machines and things. I now have two 500GB drives for boot and virtual machines, plus two terabyte drives for data. I’ve also defected to Western Digital after the Seagate debacle recently; I actually sent back a terabyte Seagate drive – unopened – because I didn’t trust it!

I have two 500GB Caviar Blue drives they are supposedly faster. I also have two Caviar Green drives for storage, as they are low power, and cooler running, but a bit slower. Well that’s fine, as they mainly stream data, so as long as it comes off quickly, it’s good enough.

I copied the data using – ironically enough – Seagate DiscWizard. Western Digital’s disk copying software doesn’t work if the SATA controllers are set to AHCI mode, which mine are. It just crashed and burned and decided it couldn’t see my CD drive. DiscWizard, however, saw all the discs, and copied everything over quite happily. It just has to see a Seagate drive, but doesn’t care which direction you go with the data. It’s based on Acronis TrueImage. It seems Ghost, formerly the darling of disk cloning, is now a weird attempt at backup. Then again, that’s just like most of Symantec’s software.

So far, things seem quicker, and I have a ton of space free now. We’ll see how it goes!