Last week my hard drive on my development machine started to die. Today I got the new drive in and finally back up to speed. What is great is about how much time it took me to get functional again. Within 2 hours of installing the hard drive I pretty much had the OS, user accounts, email (accounts and mail), development, IM, and my suite of everyday applications installed and working. You could never say that about an MS box (at least pre-Windows 7). What facilitated the ease was Time Machine. I just pointed the Snow Leopard at my Time Machine partition and it sucked all my user account and various settings on to the box (~/Library). All I had to do was install the latest applications, which took 15 minutes tops. It was awesome.

Since I was starting from scratch I knew I wanted to load Snow Leopard on the machine, but I wasn't sure how I wanted to do it. I talked to a buddy at work who runs both Snow Leopard and Leopard off the same drive and so I got some pointers from him. The drive is 1.0 TB, so I partitioned it 900 GB for Snow Leopard and 100 GB for Leopard. I have a feeling I probably overestimated the Leopard volume, but better to have more than not enough.