At 10:29 PM 7/2/98 -0500, Oscar Ricardo Silva wrote:
>We have received a large number of Dell OptiPlex GXa Pentium II, 333 MHz,
>mini-towers.  These are configured with 64 MB of RAM, one 4.3 GB hard drive
>on one controller and a CD-ROM on the other controller.  One of our users
>would like to add a sizable amount of hard drive space to that
>configuration.  One idea was to put three 8 GB drives (replacing the
>original 4.3 GB drive).  The other was to add two 14 GB drives in addition
>to the original drive.  Although there is only real space for two internal
>drives we're getting a bracket kit so we can put the third drive in one of
>the free 5.25" bays.  All these computers will be running Windows 95 OSR
>2.1 and we will be using FAT32 to format all the drives.  By the way, we've
>decided on IBM Deskstar drives, either the 8 ,capacity 8.4 GB, or the 14GX
>,capacity 14 GB (and IBM has even announced a 16 GB one)
>
>Is anybody aware of any problems in putting all those drives in that tower?
>Although it appears they can physically fit in there one concern we have is
>the amount of heat that may be generated.  How about the thought of one
>partition per disk?

I have built systems as you describe with multiple large HDs in the
case and heat has not been an issue, as long as the drives are not
too tightly compressed together.  Remember that systems are
designed to have three to four hard drives installed.

The single partion per hard drive using OSR2 versions seems to work
well with 32bit fats.  Just remember to notify the user that any old
16bit fat applications on the system that access the hard drives,
(File Manager for one), are very problematic with partitions larger
than 2gigs.   File Manager will only acknowledge the first 2gigs
of a large partition. I had warned a user about this and he continued
to use File Manger with a 8gig partition...  the partition failed due to
File Manager accessing it.   I recommend deleting WINFILE.EXE from
the C:\Windows directory on any system with large partitions.  It
saves a great deal of problems downline....



BOB WRIGHT  -   The NOSPIN GROUP
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