Slackware Hard Drive Considerations
 

Hello everyone,

I just finished my download of the Slackware DVD and I am considering buying a new hard drive to have a fresh start from scratch.

I would like to enquire if hard drives larger than two Terabyte are supported by Slackware 14 (32-Bit). If not I am considering buying a smaller SSD drive. Is there anything I need to be concerned about?

Thanks,
Mkd75

Yes, they are supported. For very large drives just use GPT when partitioning (e.g. gdisk instead of fdisk).

You might consider the new hybrid drives - sort of the best of SSD and traditional spin media.

To give you relevant hints we'd need to know on what kind of machine you're going to install that hard drive (laptop? desktop? server?) and its intended usage(s).

It's a desktop machine (Atom processor 1,6 Ghz and Intel graphics) which might be running Apache but that would mainly be for "localhost" connections. It currently runs CentOS 6.4 on a 160 GB hard drive which I would like to replace with a larger drive.

It is that I am currently studying for my LPI 102 exam and most likely need to get into the nitty-gritty of Linux internals. I know quite a lot of people who started with Slackware and they are now top-notch IT-consultants. Also one thing which is important to me is the community aspect of the distribution. A few years ago I used to talk about "Linux desktop" revolutions but for me it doesn't matter that much anyone. I prefer to have a good community you can develop software with and learn from. I don't really believe in 6-months/9-months release cycles anymore.

So that'd be a 3" 1/2. I'd suggest 7200 RPM, SATA 3 with transfer speed @ 6 G/s, cache 64 M.

Here (in France) you can find a good one @ around 80 €, VAT included (VAT adds 19.6 % to vendor's price).

I'd buy one of those.

... and, if you're in the US, take a look at Micro Center (http://www.microcenter.com/) for good prices, wide choice and excellent service.

If there's a Micro Center near you, be prepared to spend a lot time there -- it's a toy store for geeks.

Hope this helps some.

On a (home-)server your bottleneck most likely will not be the harddisk, but the network connection. I doubt that you will have benefits besides faster boottime when using a SSD here, so just go for a HDD.

Thanks everyone for your kind advise. I am in the middle of backing up my hard drive to my NAS and then there will be (hopefully) Slack'n Roll.

I am from Germany and usually order from these guys: www.alternate.de

Some further questions piled up: So far I have been spoilt with Suse and Mandriva to configure my printer and scanner (YAST and Mandriva Control Centre). I am using a HP PSC 1510 which uses "hplib". Is it hard to install this on Slackware?

Slackware includes HPLIP, Hewlett-Packards's HP Linux Imaging and Printing software. You won't need to install anything but you will need to do a quick and easy set up of HPLIP (which will also configure CUPS for you).

Details are at http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/index.html. You do not need to download anything from the H-P site, as mentioned, it's part of the distribution.

Hope this helps some.

I have also made good experiences with this one: http://www.mindfactory.de/

Glad I'm not the only one who walks in there in the morning and when I finally leave it's dark outside. That Madison Heights store is pretty neat. :-P

Oh, yeah -- used to drive over there from Southfield and Six Mile, recently made an excuse to drive the 200+ miles to Detroit with, oh, by the way, a stop in Madison Heights.

Whatever works!

I lived in Southfield with my family eight month in 1987. My kids did go to the Eisenhower elementary school on Larkins Street and I keep a copy of an article in the Southfield Eccentric with a picture of the youngest one holding a banner with a classmate. But maybe that's slightly off topic...

I would like to report that I finally got Slackware 14 installed. This post guided me in the right direction and I would like to thank everyone for their help.

Cool, glad it worked out. So what did you buy in the end? ;)

I still had an old Mandriva installation on a 2 TB hard drive. It originated from the "Moondrake" series but has been fed with the OpenMandriva "Cooker" updates. The last update tore things apart though so I had to reinstall anyway. It's just a standard drive, not SSD or hybrid.