That inner Geek
Ok. I wanted an SSD drive – a solid state drive; it works like the flash memory in your camera. The prices dropped to the point where I said "I’ll get one". It is installed in the D drive slot in my computer. I had a 120Gb drive in that slot that I bought used from Free Geek for $15; the plan then was to use that disk as my C drive, the system disk, because the hard drive that came with this computer was only a 32Gb drive – huge, once upon a time, but now tiny and easily filled.
In fact, I began cloning the C drive onto the D drive to switch to a larger system disk, but changed my mind and just used it as "more space". At one point, I had five hard drives installed or connected on this computer. I got a new USB HD in March, with 2,000 Gb of space, an immense blank space to store things on.
One of the USB drives is a dedicated USB drive – tough, portable, and made to be moved from computer to computer. It’s a sealed unit; I will use it the way it’s designed, and now that it’s 70% full, I disconnected it and set it aside.
The other small USB drive is actually a laptop drive that someone gave me; to use it, I bought an enclosure for it and now use it as a USB drive. I am thinking of using the SSB drive and the laptop drive as "new" hard drives for my system, but haven’t yet figured out how to clone my C drive onto the SSD drive, to use it as the system disk.
I HAD the tools to clone the C drive; they were "part" of the drive I bought from Free Geek (well, not really part of the purchase; I downloaded the tools from Seagate. com, the maker of the drive). When I took the D drive out, it turned out that that was my "key" to use the Seagate tools; I could not do what I planned to do.
Right now, I am wondering if I could just reformat the SSD drive – start from zero, as it were, and use the back up copies on the BIG drive to update that reformat, instead of taking days to download new updates from MSN and to reload all the programs I have acquired.
The "mystery" to me is this: The original hard drive is an ISE drive; it has different data and power connectors than the SSD drive I bought the other day. My motherboard is new enough to have both ISE connectors and SATA connectors, so, at this point, the C drive is an IDE drive and the SSD drive is hooked up to the SATA connections, and both seem to be working.
As an experiment, I copied the Music file from the big drive to the SSD drive – 4 Gb of data transferred in just a few minutes. Fast and accurate data transfer.
At this time, I see my options as these:
1. Leave the computer alone. It works, don’t fuck with it.
2. Disconnect the big drive, reformat the system and start from "new", and then use the stored copy of the C drive to "update" the installation – programs, MSN updates for XP, and misc. updates to the system.
But, it’s like I wrote the other day – you do not want to make your daily driver your project car; you have to be able to get around.
Much as I want to, I fear making this computer into a project – any more than I already have.
I’ll think about it some more.
The bank just gave me a huge increase on my Visa card… I suppose I could just buy that laptop I want, use that as the "daily driver" and turn this desktop into a project machine.
I’ll think about that too.
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