"Paul" schreef in bericht
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Linea Recta wrote:
"Paul" schreef in bericht
...
Linea Recta wrote:
"Paul" schreef in bericht
P4B266 Yes 1007

OK, I have bios version 1010. This is the latest version exept for one,
which is branded as "beta".

Furtermore, according to this reply:

http://support.asus.com/faq/detail.a...2-112D10B69093

the P4B266 is able to work with 200 GB drives. So I could consider
getting this drive:

http://www.informatique.nl/110610/we...tal-160gb.html

Although the price is high per MB base...

The ones still available here, are a little expensive too.

*******

One thing that's nice about the smaller drives, is they won't
have the 4KB sectors on them. I was cursing the two drives I got
here, with the 4KB sectors and "512e" emulation, because they're
so slow when dealing with small files. Took twice as long as
usual to do a backup. They claim you can align partitions on 4KB
boundaries, and that is supposed to help, but I have multiple
partitions under WinXP, and I don't think there is any fix for that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Format#512e

There's nothing "Advanced" about that format. It's just a nuisance.




I managed to order a Seagate 160GB IDE 2MB ST3160215ACE on line for 49
Euros.
Today I received the drive and I have built it into the PC.
It was detected by the BIOS properly.

I did have a few surprises though...
The drive seemed already formatted.
Pagefile.sys was back on D: even before I put it back there manually.
I ran Hard Disk Sentinel test program, which also reads SMART data.
Performance and Health are excellent, but it also displays "Power on time
913 days"(!)
I got no information from the web shop that the drive was second hand...

Honesty is hard to find.

Brand new drives, can come formatted. So that part is not unusual.
But the power on hours would be set to zero at the factory, before
the drive shipped.

I don't know about refurbished drives though. For example, if
you got a warranty return from Seagate, do they reset the SMART
on those ? I don't know the answer to that. Check the label
and see if it says "Refurbished" on it somewhere.



On the web shop it doesn't say anything about 'refurbished'. It even looks
new. Today I had them on the phone about this, and the guy told me it was a
refurbished drive indeed. He said I could have known because it says
'warranty 6 months' on the web shop. They offered me money back, but I
decided to keep it and get 5 euro's off because of the unclear conditions. I
do hope it lives longer than 6 months though...
The drive performs very fast, in fact much faster than the existent C:
drive.



--
regards,

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