Hi,

I am making a low budget backup system from an old PII computer. It has a small 6 Gb disk with the system files and a large 120 Gb disk on the secondary IDE channel. The computer will run 7 days a week and perform scheduled backups for laptops in the office using backuppc. At night no laptops are present so it can't do much. The question is now: should the hard drives be spung down with hdparm or not? I have read posts in this forum saying that it's rather silly to spin down an IDE disk since it's the spinning up that wears down a disk. Other people seem to tink that spinning down should occur after 1.5 minutes of idle operation. Could I have some extra opinions on this subject?

I don't spin mine down. I have a 1996 vintage pentium with a quantum bigfoot 2gig 5 inch drive that's been spinning for years 24/7 - just as a print server these days. I don't spin down any of the other 24/7 boxes here. I personally think they are better spinning... I get good life out of the drives I think...

BTW, how did you get the 120gig to work in the P2? With an IDE card?

thank you for sharing your experience,

with respect to the 120 Gb drive, I found a BIOS version for the motherboard (ASUS P2B ) which allows using big hard drives (120 Gb is the maximum).