I'm glad you asked this question! I'm in the process of upgrading one computer from an 80Gb EIDE to a 500Gb SATA, (Geeks.com had them on sale for about $50) and I never thought to ask it myself. Of course, there was also a day that I thought I'd *never* run out of storage space on a full Gigabyte drive, either! Thanks to those who answered. It will give me something new to learn over the Holidays. Stu On Wed, 2009-12-16 at 20:26 -0700, betty wrote: > This is the last forum for my research on this project, everyone's > advice here has always been most helpful. Although i haven't needed too > much advice lately (since linux is sooo stable !) > > I have an old pentium 3 with ide hdd that i have been using for many > years. It is a little slow (to say the least) especially running > multiple apps. > I was just given a dell optiplex mini form factor w/pentium 4 and sata > drive connectors. (*no hdd*). > It looks like there are two options here; > > i can get ide to sata connectors and use my old drive so nothing really > changes and it seems easy, however the hdd is old (maybe 10 years) so i > risk eventual hardware failure. > or > i can get a sata drive and copy everything to it. seems best way to me. > not that much more expensive. will last longer etc. > > question: if i go for option two, is there a way to copy (like mirror) > my old drive stuff to the new one so it works and looks the same to > me???, if so how do i do that? (the old computer does not have a working > cdrw) > or do i need to do a new install and copy my files over :( > > thanks for your patience and help in advance. > --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss