Can you get < 40 GB SATA drives?

Facey

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Feb 21, 2006
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Are there any SATA drives less than 40 GB around?

I want a small drive to install XP on that I can use when overclocking. If I push it to hard it seems XP can corrupt itself rather easily, and when that happens I have to take the drive cage to another PC and replace whatever DLL or system32/config/ registary file that got corrupted.

A 40 GB drive is kind of overkill for just XP and a couple of testing apps.

I probably have one or two old 10/20 GB drives lying around somewhere, but ribbon cables are a pain, even rounded ones. :p

Even if there are drives less than 40 GB around, I dunno if they would actually be cheaper than 40 GB. The price difference between 40 & 80 is almost nothing...
 

Pain

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Probably not, but you can get an 80G driver for $50, so just use that, or partition it. If you partition it, then you can run ghost images of the fresh install of xp and if you screw it up you can reload the ghost image in minutes and be back to where you started.
 

enewmen

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Get the WD Raptor 37.
It's also VERY fast !

If you must have a small drive, perhaps you can get a desktop flash drive. This is also a very fast alternative.

If you want to save money, use your old drive and make a new 10 gig partition for the c:, Then all your data is safe in the other partition.
 

Facey

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Ok, thanks guys. :) I think I will get an 80GB (only a couple of $ differnce between a 40GB and 80GB) and partition it into 3. 2 for XP and a backup like Pain said, and one for random data.

If you must have a small drive, perhaps you can get a desktop flash drive. This is also a very fast alternative.

I'm not sure if my motherboard can boot from USB. I will check, it depends on the price I supose. A small SATA drive may be cheaper than a very small USB hard drive. :?

Only the WD Raptor that's about 36 GB--but why do you want one, may I ask?

To have a seperate XP install, so I can unplug my other drives when im overclocking to make sure nothing happens to them. :)
 

Pain

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Yeah, I forgot about the raptors, but anyway.

I wouldn't personally use 3 partitions. If you use 2 you can still save an image file of the OS in a directory on the second partition and have room for data. Using 2 partitions will allow the directories on the 2nd to grow as necessary. If you have 3 partitions then the partitions are of fixed size. It's just better use of disk space IMO to leave it at 2.