I see. Yeah that'd work.

but what about larger ones?

They're slower.

This is why I use a utility box. Nothing is actually "slow" if I don't have to stand there babysitting it. And nothing really seems to take all that long after running badblocks on modern terabyte-sized drives.

HOWEVER. "Funny you should mention that." The 14gb drive I just did, did not go as swimmingly, so I must issue an amendment.

Basically I got a nonsensical 'not enough disk space' error after clicking Create Image. And that error turned up no Search results. But I recalled there is a similarly odd error with the benchmarking in Disks if you're running the 32bit version. So I booted a 64bit live-ISO. Which went fine /after/ I also did 'gksu gnome-disks' to get around a Permissisons error that blocked Disks from writing to the box's main drive.

Which really didn't cause me more than a couple of minutes of farting around, but I can see for a lot of people that would no longer be Fall-Off-Log easy.

So... poop. Sorry about that.

I don't think there are any simple solutions to this problem. Simple: buy a brand new HD and burn it in for a few days. It'll then last you a good 2 years without any problems.

I think old hard drives sound cool when they power on, but I personally prefer a quiet one for my everyday pc. Drive noise is very distracting. But I like collecting old hard drives and matching them to the most period correct machines for that perfect appearance and sound.

They do chirp and buzz in a distinctive way you don't hear anymore, at least not from healthy drives...

I used to use whatever harddrive I happened to have laying around when building a "new" rig, but at some point I bought a batch of 20gig laptop IDE drives (with very late manufacturing date for a 20gig drive) and later on I bought around 10 (maybe more, maybe fewer, I can't remember) IDE laptop converters, so these days I simply use one of those preformatted laptop drives when building a retro rig. They are silent and very fast 😀

I also have a couple larger laptop drives (all scavenged from dead laptops I was gifted from relatives) and used those in my desktops. The quickness or slowness seem to depend more on their manufacturing date then their size anyway (disclaimer, I never did actual testing and loading times don't really bother me too much anyway, I'm pretty much quickly satisfied what that is concerned).

I don't mind being able to hear the harddrive as long as it's whining doesn't drive me mad 🤣.

And these days I often test unknown harddrives (for instance ones that I dumpsterdived) on one of my test mobo's first as I already destroyed 2 motherboards with a defective harddrive 🙁