Thx for reminding me. Yeah, I'm almost done ripping & encoding. Bored out of mind after 500+ CDs. It will be a looong time b4 I buy another...

Yeah, my experiences were with partitioning & formatting a 120GB drive. In FDISK, all the characters beginning with the 120GB drive shift one space to the right. If you look closely, all the data is there, but you have to decrypt it, so to speak. At first, it looks like something is very wrong. But it works, long as you use the version of FDISK that sppts drives larger than 64GB (see my 'Files' page).

Then I had that problem with W2K assigning drive letters to drive at SCSI ID 2 before SCSI ID 0. Not supposed to do that, and I still don't know wh it did. But it screwed up W2K after I restored the image. After clean install, it assigned drive letters the way it should. Go figure. I am leary about installing new drives between O/S installs now.

There is also a problem with SCSI hard drives with WXP. If you cruise to Storagereview.com forums you can read about it in ~100-post thread. I updated SCSI guide already.

Also have 1st-hand info on installing & using Tekram U3W SCSI controller. Unlike the U2W, which I had b4, the U3W will not be detected automatically during W2K install. You need to 'Press F6' & load driveres from floppy .. otherwise you will see no SCSI drives to install O/S to. I will probably post the contents of this floppy on my 'Files' page, cuz it's a somewhat of a hassle to make.

Another surprising thing is that I'm not able to 'see' my NTFS partition created with WXP, when using W2K. Seems that WXP uses NTFS v5.1, whereas W2K uses NTFS v5.0. WXP can read v5.0, but W2K can't read v5.1.

Have new system running P4 1.6A @ 2138 MHz with 1.68v via the 'wire trick' Rock solid .. the most stable system I've build yet. You simply cannot crash or lock this thing. $600 perf from a $134 CPU (Newegg.com).

Yes, SCSI is far from necessary, especially if your typical PC usage profile doesn't include tasks that access the disk very frequently. The fastest drive in the universe is no good to someone who doesn't put it to good use.

From a real-world usage standpoint, I don't put much value in (synthetic) benchmarks, which are designed 'sequentially', and therefore don't take advantage of SCSI multi-tasking capabilities. From my own experience, I witnessed far greater improvements in system performance (responsiveness) than benchmarks indicated.

SCSI's biggest validator comes after using it for several weeks, and then returning to an IDE-based system. You don't realize how zippy the Porsche is until you drive the Volkswagon loaner while your car is in the shop.