After spending all night and day shuffling data off old hard drives onto my new terabyte drive, everything is complete. Some of the drives in my server were really slow and it’s only because it was attached to my network that I never noticed. My main video drive, for example, was managing a whole 2 megabytes per second. It took ages to empty that!

After removing the five old drives and the ATA controller card the machine draws 100w of power. I have left the kill-a-watt plugged in permanently and will watch it out of mild interest. Strangely the UPS draws 50w with no load.

With all my data moved across I have 583GB of space free. This should do me for a few years if I remember to clean up and periodically delete accumulated junk.

For those of you who are interested, have some stats:

Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1      121601   976760001   83  Linux

Attached devices:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: ATA      Model: MAXTOR STM310003 Rev: MX15
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 05

/dev/sda1:
 Timing cached reads:   578 MB in  2.00 seconds = 288.34 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  226 MB in  3.01 seconds =  74.98 MB/sec

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3              14G  2.0G   12G  15% /
varrun                221M  300K  220M   1% /var/run
varlock               221M     0  221M   0% /var/lock
procbususb            221M  120K  221M   1% /proc/bus/usb
udev                  221M  120K  221M   1% /dev
devshm                221M     0  221M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda1              99M   32M   63M  34% /boot
/dev/hdb1              58G   39G   19G  69% /data
/dev/hdc1              38G   12G   26G  32% /data/pub/pictures
/dev/hdd1              74G   54G   16G  78% /data/pub/audio
/dev/sda1             113G   57G   51G  53% /data/backups
/dev/sdb1             147G  131G  8.3G  95% /data/pub/video
/dev/sdc1             917G   17G  854G   2% /mnt

See the tiddly hard disks that are mostly full in that list? They’re all going to be removed and replaced with that nice, shiny 1TB drive. Rather than having six drives in my computer chewing away at my electricity bill, there will be two - a PATA boot drive and the SATA data drive.

Copying the data across takes quite a long time though.

I’ve just acquired an interesting collection of old computer kit. I now have:

• An Amiga 500 without PSU
• An Amiga 1500 with monitor and keyboard
• A WYSE serial terminal
• And a USB floppy drive

The A500 will probably end up sitting on a shelf somewhere until I can find a PSU for it. I’ll use the A1500 since it has a hard disk and a monitor; I don’t exactly trust 21 year old floppy disks or have a spare TV to use. The Amiga 1500 has a slightly damaged keyboard, but it’s only a few keys on the numberpad that I’ll probably never press anyway.

The terminal might have a problem that causes it to turn off randomly, but I tested it the other night for about an hour and it seemed OK. Once I’ve confirmed I can connect it to my Linux machine I’ll create a giant serial cable and put it downstairs somewhere. It’ll make a nice IRC client or quick login to my server to check things. I figure I can make a long serial cable from some spare Cat5 cable and DB9 connectors.