While I was out at the ESRI User Conference having a pretty good time talking GIS and software development with all sorts of fun people, my workstation decided that it was jealous, and consequently killed the system disk.

Not apparent reason (power spike, kicking of said system, misc. magnetic fields, UFOs), but upon my return, it was cooked. We tried a few repair options, but it seems that the boot sector was beyond repair, and a new primary disk was on the agenda.

For a while now I've been reading Jeff Atwood's blog - Coding Horror , and his February posting on 10,000 RPM boot disks stuck with me. Quite incidentally, I had also just read Scott Hanselman's posting on "The Ultimate Developer Rig", which also extols the virtues of the 10,000 RPM boot disk.

Since I was now in the market, that's just what I got. Since time was an issue, I had to hit the local bog-box electronics join and paid a little more than would be ideal - NewEgg has the same drive for $169 (after mail-in rebate).

After fighting with the Dell SATA drivers (apparently they were having some issues with their FTP site because the driver I downloaded crashed the windows xp installer! - we had better luck copying the driver from another system), I got the disk mounted, partitioned and the OS installed.

Then I started to install apps. It took about 2 minutes to install all of Office 2003 (yeah I'm going to switch to 2007 but I have not quite figured out all the ribbons yet!). This seemed fast, but I had not done that in a while, so it was hard to tell. I timed the Visual Studio 2005 install at 14 minutes end to end. And I have done this a few times, and that's a pretty big change from the expected 30-40 minutes. I was going to time the ArcGIS Desktop install, but I was doing a bunch of other stuff (work - how dare it intrude!).

I'll report back again in a few weeks with more info on how this impacts my daily work flow, but so far it's definitely faster.

Oh - and the dead disk? Just the boot sector was fried. I was able to mount it as a secondary disk and pull everything off. Ran chkdsk, had it mark the bad blocks and it's good to go. Now I just need to get an external USB enclosure for a SATA disk, and I'll have a local external back up drive.