Partioned Hard Drives

[jwmorrice]

Thank you one and all....as usual TERBites come thru with the goods. I've moved all my data files over to the D drive and this freed up good space on the C drive for the programs. I feel a few GB lighter in my C's

Now, if I may, one other question....

Ubuntu. Lot's of references above on this...something I should try, as a neophyte, now that I have some space to play with? I assume it is free ware...
Will it make a big difference over IE and will it be something that I have to learn?

Ubuntu is another operating system that you would have to learn. Right now you probably have more than enough on your plate just with Windows. I'd say, get more knowledgeable and comfortable with that before you consider branching out.

jwm

 

[WoodPeckr]

Ubuntu. Lot's of references above on this...something I should try, as a neophyte, now that I have some space to play with? I assume it is free ware...
Will it make a big difference over IE and will it be something that I have to learn?

Ubuntu and all associated software are free.

IE is just a browser. Ubuntu uses Firefox browser.
If you know Firefox, just click on the FF icon in Ubuntu and you can surf immediately as you can on Windows with nothing different.

Ubuntu is a different OS you will have to learn, as you would have to learn Snow Leopard on Mac. Ubuntu is laid out very simple and intuitive IMHO and is about as easy to pickup as a Mac. With a dual boot system you basically have two OSs. You will always have Windows as backup, while learning Linux at your own pace. Ubuntu Forums are excellent for help and just as friendly as this Forum.

 

[wollensak]

Learning Ubuntu is Easy

Ubuntu is another operating system that you would have to learn. Right now you probably have more than enough on your plate just with Windows. I'd say, get more knowledgeable and comfortable with that before you consider branching out.

jwm

Ubuntu is easy to learn, much less quirky than Windows. My son's windows machine motherboard crapped out, so I attached his hard drive as a slave to a PC I loaded with Ubuntu 9.04.. His interests are music downloading, Internet chat, youtube and other online video.

I handed him the machine. He immediately got the Ubuntu Rythmbox music player going, accessing all the tunes he had recorded on two hardrives on his Windows machine.
He figured out on his own how to view .rar files, use chat etc. etc. He never even asked me "How do I do this?".

Ubuntu has met 100% of his needs and he was able to figure it out all by himself.
He is not a computer geek at all.

The old Windows machine was a Dell Dimension 2400 P4. the new one is an Asus Tualatin P3. The combination of Linux and SCSI means there is almost no perceptible difference in speed. Not surprising, since the Tualatin chip was actually faster than first-generation P4s.

 

[WoodPeckr]

Ubuntu is easy to learn.
My 6 old year old nephew has been using 64 bit Ubuntu 9.04 for a few months months now. He loves the games and his dad added more games from the Linux repositories, all free of course. Their new PC came with Vista which they seldom use. They all like Ubuntu better.

 

[The Options Menu]

The advantages I agree with are in posts #9, #12, #13, #17 and #18.

I feel it makes storages easier and more organized and speeds up defragging when you don't have to defrag the entire drive. I just defrag the C-drive.


PS: Since I mainly use Ubuntu now there is NO need to defrag at all.
Windows requires routine defragging.
Linux requires NO defragging, it just runs worry free...

Well, it's not that Linux requires no defragging, it's just that linux filesystems put a lot more thought into writing things on the disk in the first place. Also, linux encourages the use of multiple partitions (There is no concept of drive letters, everything is just mounted into one filesystem which makes expansion easy).

If you are using Ubuntu you should look into setting up a software RAID array. I use Debian have two 1 TB SATA Disks. They are set up in a mirrored software RAID. (The Debian and Ubuntu installer will do this easily)

Disk 1: 1.5 GB SWAP | 50 GB '/' | 50 GB '/home' | 900 GB 'media'
Disk 2: 1.5 GB SWAP | 50 GB '/' | 50 GB '/home' | 900 GB 'media'

The SWAPS are never used, but if they were they'd be interleaved, plus suspend to disk uses SWAP, and the rest of the partitions are exact mirrors. That way if a drive fails, I just pull it and replace it, and re-sync the RAID. I also dump /home and the media partition to a USB Disk every couple of weeks. If you set user / group permissions on your media you can prevent deletion accidents.

Because of the flexibilty, and standard tools in linux software RAID is > hardware RAID, IMHO.

Once every couple of years I buy two new drives, and copy the stuff over. I could also buy two new drives, install them, mount them as a dedicated 'media' partition, then grow the '/home' partitions, but that would get loud and the USB disk would be too small for backups. (Historically one old drive gets used for backups and one is given away.)

As far as the Windows guy goes-- There are a number of 'free linuxes' that might let you grow or shrink a NTFS partition, plus there are some commercial tools that will do the same. Mind you always backup your stuff before you mess with your partitions. Stuff happens.