A few weeks ago, i thought i heard one of those dreaded Hard drive clicks of doom! Since my oldest drive is the one with my important files on it, i decided not to wait until i confirmed the problem and went online and found a good deal on a 300 GB S(erial)ATA drive. It looked like it was built to last after long up-times, and since my computer never turns off, this is good.
So i spent the money, got the drive, and have spent the last couple days partitioning the new drive (and the old one) and migrating data. Theoretically, with my games running on the SATA drive, i should see increased performance. In addition, I attempted to optimize the file allocation unit sizes (FAUs are the smallest organized unit of bytes on a hard disk. A single FAU can only hold one file. So if a file, or one of it’s clusters, is smaller than the unit, then the hard disk sort of “rounds up”. In summary, larger files can be read and written faster by making the FAU bigger. However, a text document with the word “hi” (approximately 2 bytes) would actually take up much more becuase of the largers FAUs… but i digress…)
The included graphic shows my new partitions and current Hard Drive configurations. Three drives with five partitions. 
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In other news, my roommate and I applied to be resident advisors for next year. There were two workshops that we had to go to, and by wednesday we’ll know if we continue on in the hiring process. I’m pretty excited about the who deal. Not only would it substantially reduce my cost of living, but i wouldnt have to be running from building to building all the time. I’d be working a lot more, but i’d be working from my room.
We’ll see…