I love computer hardware. Especially the pace of improvement in it. I’m referring specifically to notebook hard drives.

About a year ago, when I bought this laptop, the most capacious internal notebook hard drive available was a 120GB 5400RPM drive. I opted for the smaller but faster 100GB 7200RPM model. But last night, I was able to install a new 5400RPM drive that holds 250GB, has a 50% faster data-transfer rate, and sucks up less than half the power most of the time! And it’s quieter too!

Moving my NTFS and EXT3 data to the new drive was a cinch, using the “gparted” partition editor from the Ubuntu install disk. Basically just a matter of copy and paste, though I had to pkill gnome-volume-manager first so that it wouldn’t auto-mount the partitions as it created them. Moving the encrypted partitions over was a little more difficult; I had to create them from scratch on the new drive, then manually copy the data over. Fortunately I’d picked up an external drive case a couple days ago, so I didn’t have to copy things to a different system across the network and then copy them back (this notebook, like most, only has room for one internal drive at a time).

So I can now keep my music collection on my notebook (I didn’t have room for it before), and still have room to breathe, digitally speaking. 🙂 Which reminds me, it’s time to start loading my music disks into it…