So my old WD2500AAKS boot drive died on my main PC the other week, not bad as its about 5 years old.

I ordered a replacement WD5000AAKS – basically a Western Digital Caviar Blue 500Gb, the same drive but twice the size.

I didn’t bother to fit the new drive until today as I thought I might as well install the new Fedora 13. It turns out the drive is a duffer too – and before you say its a bad controller/cable, I swapped both of them too, and the two drives have different issues.

So I’ve now ordered a WD Caviar Black 500Gb drive, which will be faster than the Blue’s, and hopefully a bit more reliable – it does have a 5 year warranty from the manufacturer, and only cost an extra tenner or so.

Next I have to deal with how to ship the duff drive back to the ebayer from France, postage for which could be half the price of the drive I’m returning, which they say they’ll pay……

So as I won’t be getting Fedora 13 installed on my Core-i5 I thought I’d try upgrading my old Pentium4 that’s currently running F11. So I used these instructions to do it using yum – basically install a new /etc/release file, do “yum clean all && yum -y upgrade” and wait for 2Gb of RPM’s to download. I’ll see in the morning if I have a bootable box!

Oh and did you know that SATA3 drives are shipping – 6Gbps with 64Mb cache. Can’t see its worth it, better off waiting for SSD’s to come down in price a bit.