Too much data

[Funkstar]

i hate big hard drives.

Just set up a 400gig drive in an external SATA case and am copying data over from two 250gig drives.

grrrrrrrrrrrr it's taking *ages*

Formatting the drive took a couple of hours in itself. Would be nice if windows gave you more information in their copy dialogs too. Something like a download dialog would be nice. OS9 on the Mac used to do this, it was great used to give you loads of info about the copy/move

But i suppose once this is all done i can rip the pile of CDs i've bought recently

[Howard]

Doesn't it say 20956345 minutes remaining?

[Steve]

I'm fresh out of space. My four 80GB drives are nearly full up.

Time to upgrade... four 300GB drives in the next couple of months I think.

[Funkstar]

actually windows was sensible enough to just give up and not even attempt to estimate how long it was going to take. i stopped the transfer and started moving it over a screens worth of sub directories at a time.

[Paul Adams]

Would be nice if windows gave you more information in their copy dialogs too. Something like a download dialog would be nice.

One thing I love about Vista

Drag & drop operations give you a number of objects being copied/moved on the icon under your mouse cursor, and the copy dialogue box has full source & destination paths of current file being copied, number of files and KB left to copy, current throughput for the operation in MB/s and an estimate of the time left based on recent throughput.

For storage I go for speed over size, I like my RAID0 Raptors on XP x64 - the boot time for Windows is about as long as the POST
Extra disks to me are just places to put my master files for unattended DVD installs (so I can update the slipstreamed images with hotfixes and new versions of any software I auto install), source code, games and whopping 13GiB of music.

[Funkstar]

right, thats decided it then. I'm moving to Vista when they finaly finish it! Why oh why didn't they do this before?

I have most of my albums ripped to FLAC, Ogg and MP3 and i'm trying to sort things out before i get my Squeezeboxes next week (finger crossed!).

I should really just bite the bullet and get a decent RAID NAS box, but i can't afford the ~£1000 for the one i really want (Infrant ReadyNAS X6 with 4x 400gig drives)

[Steve]

right, thats decided it then. I'm moving to Vista when they finaly finish it! Why oh why didn't they do this before?

Just a guess here, but I bet the amount of info the OS gives you depends on which version of Vista you plonk for. Hopefully it's configurable though.

[Funkstar]

As long as i continue my Action Pack subscription i'll be ok. That should come with the Pro and server versions i would think

[kirkabus]

Funkstar, if you're looking for something more interesting when copying data to your hard drive try using xcopy in a dos window. I prefer to use xcopy and batch files for doing large loads of data for backup - it also feels faster!

xcopy /? at a dos box will show you all the options its better than looking at a daft file transfer window.

[Paul Adams]

Just a guess here, but I bet the amount of info the OS gives you depends on which version of Vista you plonk for. Hopefully it's configurable though.

I think the default view is the progress bar and estimated time remaining, with a "details" button to unfold the window vertically to show the extra info.
I've been using an Ultimate key, but I can try a Home key with the same source to check if it looks different.

[smtkr]

Instead of getting larger hard drives, why don't you just delete the crap and make space for new things. I don't think I've ever used more than 30GB. I don't feel compelled to maintain a huge library of media. I download about 2GB of xvid files per week and delete all of it when I finish watching.

[Funkstar]

If i deleted the data then i wouldn't be able to listen to my music on my phone/rio karms/squeezeboxes without re-ripping it all. Which would be pointless.

Once i hvae my music sorted out i then want to start on my ripping my DVDs to Xvid. This is so i can easily play them on my laptop when offshore (just mases it easier than taking a bunch of disks), my CarPC when i build it and my Archos AV500 when i get it.

[Mike Fishcake]

i hate big hard drives.

Just set up a 400gig drive in an external SATA case and am copying data over from two 250gig drives.

If it's too stressful for you, I'll swap it for an 80GB IDE drive

[EvilMunky]

ROBOCOPY is the way to go...................set the retries up and at least you know it wont fail.

[GDVS]

ROBOCOPY is the way to go...................set the retries up and at least you know it wont fail.

Hell yes, great for mirroring a file server over the weekend when it's on a dodgy ISDN link.