Earlier this year we got some 200 GB ATA 133 hard drives for one of our older machine. It was having a slow noisy head crash, sounding a little more like a dentist’s drill every day. It was only a matter of time before everything on its hard drive went away for good, so we backed it up to the server, slapped the new drives in, formatted them, and copied everything back.
In the process, we discovered that the machine we had put the drives into only had an ATA 66 interface. It could still use the drives, but only 137 GB or so of the total 200 would be visible. Kind of a waste, but better than having a drive that was slowly shaving itself down to aluminum confetti to the tune of Aphex Twin’s “Ventolin”.
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