hard drive 6-8gb small?

someone is putting together a pc for me. he said it will have a hard drive of between 6 and 8 gb. is that small? it will have windows 98se on it and i'm hoping it won't be too slow because of this. i need to be able to load a substantial amount of pics for selling on ebay. so i need it to be stable. any advice? i'm only paying about $35 for it. so i'm sure i can make use of it somehow. and if 6 gbs is too small, is it difficult to upgrade? i'm not a techie so please speak simply!

 

thats not a lot of room, especially if you have a nice digital camera, which will burn space quickly.
The good news is adding a second hard drive to a machine is trival, and can be done in about 15 minutes with a screwdriver. So you can see how it goes, and expand if you need to. 35$ is a good price for a basic computer, if you have to put some extra money into it if you fill up, you still are sitting about 300$ cheaper than most people spend on thier machines.

 

When Win98se came out 6-8Gb drives were a reasonable size. But as Joe points out image files will consume a lot of space fast. The OS and a few (smallish) programmes won't take up much space though.

A 6-8Gb drive will likely run at ATA33 (slow by todays standards). You need to find out if the M/B supports a faster drive, such as an ATA 66 or 100 drive. If it does then you'd be mad to run a slower drive on a faster board. The slower drive would be fine as a backup/storage drive though. But not recommended to run programmes from it, unless of course the M/B is a slower one.

 

As single drive and for what I believe you wish to use it WAY. WAY. WAY TOO SMALL.

You need NO LESS than a 20gig HD. And then PARTITION SAME into a 8gig C: drive and leave the rest as one partition.

KEEP ONLY THE OS and small stuff on C:/. Install everything else to D: Drive.

The reason for the partitons is so as to keep the OS and the program software SEPARATED. Very seldom do we lose anything other then the C: drive. And If you do loose ( have to reformat C: ) YOU WILL NOT LOOSE EVERYTHING. And need to re-install maybe. But a re-install to the same location will be fine.

So the bottom line is ( at least mine ) Partition a larger HD

BillyBob

 

Or another idea.

Use the 6-8 gig as a Master drive and then a 20gig as a Partitioned slave.

BillyBob

 

Personally I think $35 is a good price for almost any pc you could slap together as long as it runs. I would just go ahead and get it with the 6-8 gig hard drive and buy another bigger one later, keep your os and other small apps on the small one and put your pics and other misc stuff on the big one. I would get a 20 gig minimum. If you are asking if a 6-8 gig drive is small, then you probly dont have the faintest idea how to partiton a hard drive, so just having 2 will be much easier, and installing a second hard drive is SIMPLE. all you gotta do is open your case, slide it in to the hard drive cage, secure it with screws, plug in 2 cables to the hard drive and your done. simple as that, your os should detect the drive when you start up your pc. just ask the person building it to make sure and put an ide cable that has an extra connector for a second hard drive.