…. hopefully. I’ve done the deed, and have switched the hard drive over to SATA 150. Hopefully, this should fix it. Won’t find out for about 6 hours though. Will post updates. Might even film it.

UPDATE: YES, IT WORKS!

Now, let me just start off my saying that, once again, this site suffered downtime. This is the second time there’s been issues in as many days, and for all the reliability that 34sp have given me over the past 8 years, it seems like the move to their professional hosting package was a bad one. I’ve experienced over 8 hours of downtime in the past week alone.

Anyway, enough of my whinging about the website. I’m happy to announce that the 1Tb hard drive is working. It turns out I DID have to change the SATA interface speed to 150. Easier said than done, and unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy as sticking a jumper on the back, like in the good old days. You have to use the software provided by the manufacturer.

Neither of the computers I own that can take SATA drives would recognise it, so the manufacturers’ solution of loading their software to change the speed was dead in the water. I knew what needed to be done, but there was no way of doing it.

So, I had to find somewhere with a SATA 300 interface. Thankfully, at work, I sit right behind a lovely, fast modern computer with more SATA 300 ports than…. er, my machines, obviously.

I slip the side off the machine, connect the cables, load the Samsung software disk, change ONE option, switch the machine off, and that was literally it. The menu option was changed, and everything I hoped was good to go. Of course, I couldn’t test this theory until I got home. 12 hours of drudgery sat before me, as I looked at my little shiny drive, in its fetching plastic case, waiting, nay BEGGING me to connect it and give it some information to store.

I burst through the door this morning, running up the stairs, clutching the drive in my puny little hands. Before my coat had even hit the floor, I was connecting it up, ready to give the drive its first taste of proper binary.

Within minutes, I was rebooting, hoping to see a drive called “BIG” in my computer. I did! WOOO!

I’d copied a few files over when I was messing about with USB connections, so I tried to delete them and start from scratch. It wouldn’t delete them. Erk.

I tried to format the drive, it wouldn’t do that either..

I rebooted and drived the same thing. It still wouldn’t.

I deleted the current partition, and created a new one. Phew, this time it would format. I assume it just didn’t like the format that Vista gave it. I just performed a quick format, however, as a full format would have taken forever. Probably not the 12 hours it took while it was connected via USB, but it would still take some time.

Data is now copying across from the old drive onto the new one with no errors or ill effects so far, and it should take another couple of hours. As for filming it, there really wasn’t anything to see. I did intend to put the machine on this desk so I could see the monitor, but I realised there was no point. It would either work, or it wouldn’t.

I’m going to have a celebratory beer and hopefully draw the line under what must be the most boring series of posts in the whole history of blogging.