Upgrade or new PC ?

[davholla]

I hope this is not a stupid question

I have a Medion PC 40 GB hard drive, 256 MB RAM 1.8 GHz processor.
Dual boot Windows and Linux

Now I need more hard drive (for photos etc) and more RAM and I have two options :-

1) Upgrade RAM £50 and buy an external hard drive
http://www.dabs4work.com/ProductView...1026&InMerch=1
£120 = total £170

2) Buy a new PC - £400

What is best ? I am worried that the external hard drive would be slow - can I use it as part of my home for Linux ? Or should I just put all my documents, photos there to free up space ?

Part of the problem is that on 20GB Ubuntu partition a) photos take lots of space but also I need space for applications etc.

What do people think ??

BTW the max RAM I can have is 1024MB

[bwkaz]

I'm not sure, but I bet the external hard drive won't be much slower than an internal version would be. USB2 (assuming you can do that) maxes out at ~480 megabits/sec -- but IDE drives can't transfer more than ~30 megabytes/sec anyway (that's 240 megabits/sec). Their "ATA-xxx" rating is only the burst transfer rate, and nobody ever gets them to burst. Sustained rates haven't really gone up from about 30 mbit/sec yet, I don't think.

Now, yes, SATA is quite a bit faster (both SATA1 and SATA2) in its burst speed, but the drive mechanics don't run that much faster (I've just tested the read speed of my SATA2 drive, and I only get about 40 megabytes/sec, or 320 megabits/sec), so the sustained rates will still be similar. Of course, given the age of the processor, I'm guessing SATA isn't an option for the internal drive either, but even if it was, the rate that you get wouldn't max out the USB2 bus.

So since it's way less expensive, I'd say grab an external disk. (Was there a reason the memory upgrade was included with that? I assume you're running out, or something?)

[retsaw]

bwkaz, your speeds seem a bit off. According to Wikipedia IDE has a theoretical maximum of 133MB/s. What did you use to test your drive speeds? I'd expect a test using hdparm on a modern drive to get at least 60MB/s read speed and my new 750GB Samsung SATA II drive gets over 90MB/s when tested with hdparm. Not that I view these figures as that important, but in practise you won't get a throughput of much more than 20MB/s over USB and it will be noticeably slower than an internal drive when copying large amounts of data, but with small files it won't be that noticeable.

I wouldn't use an external drive for a home partition simply because you might want to move that drive to another computer and it kind of defeats the point of having an external drive if you can't easily move it.

davholla, your link doesn't work so I can't see what you are looking at, but the prices you gave seem a little high, I'm guessing that your computer uses DDR RAM, in which case dabs have 1GB for less than £25, at that price it is definitely worth buying so long as you are otherwise happy with the performance of your computer.

You could essentially build yourself a new computer for a lot less than £400 if you are comfortable doing this, eg motherboard £40, dual-core processor £40, 2 GB DDR2 RAM £30, that's only £110 so far, you could use the case power supply and DVD drive form you old computer so you don't need to buy those, you want a new hard drive, the price there really depends on how much space you need, you might also want/need a new copy of Windows since your current copy is probably OEM and I don't think you can (and Microsoft will certainly assert this) you can legally transfer an OEM copy to what is in essence a new computer, I think you can get an OEM copy of Windows for about £60.

I think it really boils down to if you are happy with your computer aside from the hard drive and RAM issue, if you are then just get the drive and RAM, if you aren't upgrade the processor and motherboard aswell like I suggest or buy a new computer.

[IsaacKuo]

My experience is that external USB2.0 drives are about half the speed of internal IDE drives.

I agree with retsaw--don't put /home on the drive, just put data files on it.

[jamesbandido]

imho, external drives are most best suited for data storage ...

[davholla]

bwkaz, your speeds seem a bit off. According to Wikipedia IDE has a theoretical maximum of 133MB/s. What did you use to test your drive speeds? I'd expect a test using hdparm on a modern drive to get at least 60MB/s read speed and my new 750GB Samsung SATA II drive gets over 90MB/s when tested with hdparm. Not that I view these figures as that important, but in practise you won't get a throughput of much more than 20MB/s over USB and it will be noticeably slower than an internal drive when copying large amounts of data, but with small files it won't be that noticeable.

I wouldn't use an external drive for a home partition simply because you might want to move that drive to another computer and it kind of defeats the point of having an external drive if you can't easily move it.

davholla, your link doesn't work so I can't see what you are looking at, but the prices you gave seem a little high, I'm guessing that your computer uses DDR RAM, in which case dabs have 1GB for less than £25, at that price it is definitely worth buying so long as you are otherwise happy with the performance of your computer.

You could essentially build yourself a new computer for a lot less than £400 if you are comfortable doing this, eg motherboard £40, dual-core processor £40, 2 GB DDR2 RAM £30, that's only £110 so far, you could use the case power supply and DVD drive form you old computer so you don't need to buy those, you want a new hard drive, the price there really depends on how much space you need, you might also want/need a new copy of Windows since your current copy is probably OEM and I don't think you can (and Microsoft will certainly assert this) you can legally transfer an OEM copy to what is in essence a new computer, I think you can get an OEM copy of Windows for about £60.

I think it really boils down to if you are happy with your computer aside from the hard drive and RAM issue, if you are then just get the drive and RAM, if you aren't upgrade the processor and motherboard aswell like I suggest or buy a new computer.

Thanks for that - sadly although I work in software support (Oracle) I can no more build a new PC than fly. I am not even sure if I can upgrade it.

[ph34r]

Upgrading is easy, as is building. Generally, there is one of everything and it only fits one way... The "hard" part is making sure the new RAM, etc. you buy is compatible with your motherboard, etc.

[Konan]

As the man said, building a PC from scratch for Linux is duck soup, I mean easy, even for a hardware novice. Just do a little research first, or ask some questions - don't just go down to the shop and buy a bunch of stuff before you get a little education. Actually, the best way is to get a bare bones machine with the motherboard and powersupply installed in the case. Then just add the other components to suit.

Since you are willing to learn Linux, learning the underlying hardware assembly is nothing.

A USB drive is for data, and as long as it is on a USB2.0 Fast port it will be plenty fast for the machine you have. I have several that are swapped all the time - one has music, another has programming stuff, and so forth.

Konan

[gamblor01]

Just another note about building machines, most motherboard manuals (if not all of them) come with step by step instructions of what to install where. They instruct you on how to install the processor, then the fan, then the memory, then hard drives, and so on. It's really quite simple and I would recommend trying it out some time just to get some experience.

The hardest part (in my opinion) is connecting all of the little wires for the HDD LED, the power button, the power LED, and the reset switch. It's not hard, but I find it annoying because the pins are so small, close together, and are generally not in the best spot (right up against the bottom of the case). So those can be a bit annoying to put on, otherwise it's as easy as pushing pieces together.

[bwkaz]

bwkaz, your speeds seem a bit off. According to Wikipedia IDE has a theoretical maximum of 133MB/s.

Two issues with that. Number one: It's Wikipedia. Number two, 133MB/s is the burst rate (and even then, it's the absolute maximum burst rate that the drive manufacturer thought they could get away with; you won't ever see it). The sustained rate won't be anywhere near that speed either: the spindle can't move data underneath the head that fast.

(Besides, the PCI bus can't move that fast either. It's a 33MHz bus with a 32-bit width, which does come out to 132Mbyte/sec -- but there's way more than just IDE running on your PCI bus, and the other devices take that bandwidth too. SATA and SATA2 are generally on the PCIe bus, which has a lot more bandwidth available.)

What did you use to test your drive speeds?

This:

dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/null bs=1048576 count=1024

dd then helpfully prints how long it took (20-30 seconds, IIRC) and the speed (about 40 Mbyte/sec). Since I'm reading a gigabyte of data off the disk, there's no way I'll hit the burst speed (but that's not what I was looking for anyway ). Since I'm throwing the data away, the only factor being tested is the bandwidth between the disk and (eventually) the CPU.

I'd expect a test using hdparm on a modern drive to get at least 60MB/s read speed and my new 750GB Samsung SATA II drive gets over 90MB/s when tested with hdparm.

Which hdparm test? (I didn't use hdparm to test it, since I don't have it installed.) I remember there used to be two tests that it could do: one that basically tried to read out of the disk's cache (which is pointless, because the cache is tiny), and another that would try to bypass the cache (which should give results somewhere near what I got).

[ehawk]

I hesitated posting yesterday because I obviously don't know as much about disk drive specs or assembling a from-scratch computer. The responses I have seen have emboldened me to speak up *grin*.

Install both OS's to the internal hard drive. 40GB should be plenty for both, including applications, unless you have a lot of game software installed. Since the photos are taking up alot of space, use the external HD for that. The external will be slower (by what factor, I don't know, 2, 3, ?). That will make a difference in running the OS and firing up applications, but you won't mind waiting 2-3 seconds instead of 1 (I think) to load up some pics. I don't know if it would slow things noticeably to put your /home directory there. There are a lot of configuration files for your apps stored there, but they are typically tiny files. I would just put the data that you process using the applications there, as your human response/frustration time would be on par with the observed slowing, so the computer response on these would not seem a bottleneck.

Price may be a concern, but RAM is getting to be dirt cheap, and will get cheaper with time. It depends also on how that 1024 MB is divided slot-wise. What windows OS are you running? I find Ubuntu works decently with 512 MB RAM. So should windows XP. Alot of people just get it over with and max out the RAM the motherboard can handle. The processor is not such a big deal, but RAM certainly is....doubling your processor speed is just a factor of 2, but when you start using swap space instead of RAM, things slow to a standstill, depending on how much swapping you are doing. In doing number crunching, swap is thousands of times slower than RAM. Calculations went from minutes to days (just gave up, my advisor asked me why I hated the hard drive to treat it with such cruelty). That also goes for fortran vs. uncompiled mathemtatica (calculated factor of ~10,000 times slower, 1 sec -> ~3 hours).