Which machine? It is like juggling...

I bought a 300GB drive yesterday. Which machine should I put it into? And should I do a clean install or copy over the existing system?

My 3 main desktop machines:

1. my aging Pentium 400MHz machine running Win98
   12GB boot drive (2 partitions: 10GB boot, 2GB programs)
   38GB drive (2 partitions: 37GB Linux /, 200MB linux swap, 900MB win98swap)
   120GB drive (2 partitions: 60GB data, 60GB data)
   
   
2. my 933MHz Win98 machine running Win98
   20GB drive (3 partitions: 9.7GB boot, 8.3GB programs, 900MB win98swap)
   120GB data drive
   
   
3. my 2.4GHz Linux machine
   120GB drive
   120GB drive
   

(1) The old 400MHz Pentium also ran Linux before I accidentally trashed that partition a little while ago with some experiments I was doing. I'd like to convert that machine completely to Linux because it is currently the machine I use to connect to the internet, and it's dangerous to use MSWindows on the net (sooner or later some moron will develop a really dangerous virus to attack MSWindows). This machine is also one of my main archive machines, which is a stupid thing to do on an MSWindows machine connected to the net. Being an old slow machine with such large hard drives, when MSWindows crashes (as it does regularly) it takes more than half an hour to run diskscan so that it can start up again. If I keep MSWindows on this machine then this situation would dramatically worsen if the new drive used MSWindows VFAT filing system (re-booting could get to more than an hour). Not sure why I partitioned the 120GB drive in half... I have a feeling the BIOS might not be able to see giant drives. If that is so that would certainly argue against the 300GB drive going on this machine.

(2) The 933MHz Pentium is a recent rebuild. The system got so corrupted I needed to wipe everything and completely re-install Windows98, which I need for the work I do. I refuse to buy the slow, bloated spyware that is WinXP.

(3) The 2.4GHz Linux machine is now my main storage machine and I'd like to use it for my work, but it is kinda scary having all that data waiting to get trashed by a crazy program. Linux can see the Windows machines, but they can't see the Linux machine, which is annoying.

Conclusions

I should use a Linux machine for the internet. It doesn't need to be fast, so the 400MHz machine, using Puppy Linux, would be good for that. Also it is dumb to have too much storage on that machine, so I should probably cut that machine down somewhat, to a minimal installation.

I need a big storage machine separated from the internet and work. The 933MHz machine is best for that, and it makes sense for it to use Linux, which is safer than MSWindows.

The nice, fast 2.4GHz machine should become my main work machine, so I should install Win98 on it as well as Linux. I wonder if it is worthwhile move a lot of the storage off it to protect the data.

So over the next few days, of the 3 desktop machines I should end up with just one running MSWindows, and even that will only be partial. Almost everything will be Linux. I'm glad. I've been wanting to get to this for some time.