Right. still installing Gentoo on the workstation. its going to take a while before i havae a system that has a GUI and mozilla, etc, but once i have, it will be quite fast. the new hard drive is nice and fast! doing a hdparm -tT /dev/hda gives me results of 256mb/s for buffered cache and 128mb/s for buffered disk reads. its better then the 25mb/s and 3mb/s the other drive was giving!