harddisk questions

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Balton

Balton

The Beast of Worship
Mar 6, 2001
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nowadays 45gb are not much. especially if this 45gb disk is old... I mean old in an mxtrmntr-ish way.
my question is: what kind of brand should I look for. what kind of size. what price range

additionally to this:
my hd is old and so is my often patched windows. I think the first win incarnation on this disk was 98se and from this point on I just did os upgrades till xp pro. I want a clean and fresh install of windows xp but atthe same time I want to save myself alot of time with all my settings/drivers for various stuff. I'd also like to save internet related stuff. network configurations. somehow I doubt that this works
:rolleyes:

any tips / sggestions are appreciated! :tup:
 
Bot_40

Bot_40

Go in drains
Nov 3, 2001
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I got 2 SATA150 80Gb hds for £90 each ($144 each) though SATA drives still cost quite a bit more here.
 
OO7MIKE

OO7MIKE

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May 2, 2000
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SATA is spendy for what you get.

The WD1200JB (120gig HD -==- 111gig after format) drive is what I have been using for about a year. Its around $100-$110 USD
Only recently have i found it to be kinda small...but i do graphics and video editing.

Noticably faster than most drives, has 8mb of cache rather than 2mb of standard drives, and it comes with a 3 year warranty. This is something that all other HD manufacturers do not have. You shouldnt expect a HD to live 3 years anyways.....but the warranty is there for you to cash in in case it doesn't. Western digital also lets you buy and extended warranty adding another 1-2 years to your HD.

This HD seems to have the best performance/size to price ratio.
 
Master Roshi

Master Roshi

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Jul 19, 2003
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Maxtor is a good brand andf if something goes wrong all you do is send it back and you get a new one in it's place and all you pay is shipping. I have never had a problem with maxtor.

BTW how mutch do you want for your 45gb???
 
LoserMan

LoserMan

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Umm gee, with that sort of logic, we should all go back to our 640MB drives so we can back it up on one CD.

Generally you don't backup the entire contents of a drive, just the important information. I keep a pair of CDRWs that have all my important documents, and other files. Plus, I have an old 13GB HD to which I occasionally ghost a copy of my OS partition. The other 100GB of stuff is replaceable, being freely downloadable, or installed programs that I simply re-install.
 
JTRipper

JTRipper

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Sep 12, 2001
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I've had enough bad personal experiences with WD hard drives (including WD refusing to honor a warranty) that I can't recommend them, and I keep running across more WD horror stories than any other brand. In machines that get used often, it seems their bearings frequently quit. I don't care if it's warrantied - I'd rather it didn't die in the first place (sorry, Mike). I have to go with Roshi, I've had very few problems with Maxtors.

What to get really depends on what you can spend - you just can't have too much pr0n space. With drives available up to 250 GB these days, I'd just figure out what you want to spend and see what the biggest drive you can get would be. You probably won't have much trouble finding a 7200 RPM 120GB EIDE drive for under 100 euros. That 8 MB buffer is a definite plus, if you can get a drive with one of those in your budget (they're really not too much more expensive than a 2MB). As Mike said, SATA is pricey, and the performance is really negligible unless you're running RAID with large buffered drives. Also keep an eye out for the seek time of the drive - it's measured in milliseconds (ms), and anything near 9 is pretty good. Most drives today are close to that anyway, but just make sure the one you want is about 9 or even lower.

If'n you've got the cash to spend, and you're willing to spend it for performance and reliability - look into 3ware RAID cards. With two drives, you can run RAID 0 (striping - performance) or 1 (mirroring - reliability), and with 3 or more drives the 7506-4LP card is the cheapest way to get RAID 5 that I've found. It's the ultimate for both performance and reliability without spending thousands on a SCSI RAID cabinet.
 
OO7MIKE

OO7MIKE

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May 2, 2000
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I have used:
IBM - loud, slow
Maxtor - doesnt last long...but I keep buying them
Western digital - when they crash...they crash hard.

They all die, its just a matter of time and luck in having a good piece of hardware. Its about luck. I have yet to buy a hard drive that has never shown a sign of slowdowns or problems. With the world hard drives...its all luck. Quality my ass...and just pick a major name brand thats fast and has lots of room on it.
 
JTRipper

JTRipper

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Sorry, I still can't agree there. The first year I started doing freelance tech support to supplement my income, I was tending about 3 dozen systems on a regular basis. Many of them had been built or purchased within a year or two before I started. There were 6 hard drive failures that year, 5 (out of 7) WD's and an old Connor. 3 of the WD's hadn't outlasted their 1 year warranty, and one, as I mentioned, WD wouldn't even replace. I swapped 3 of the remaining 4 WD's into older systems that the owner was selling and washed my hands of WD.

The next year two Maxtors (of about 20) and two IBM's went down (of 6 - they were aging SCSI units in a light duty server). One Maxtor was pretty new (replaced a WD the previous year), the other was probably a few years old. I've had one more failure since then - the last WD (a warranty replacement from the first year). There's a couple Seagates and Samsungs in the mix somewhere, but they haven't been a problem yet. Those kind of statistics don't speak to me of luck.

As you say, every drive will wear and fail, but WD's just seem to do it far too fast and often for my taste. I was researching a problem with a Dell not long ago, and I found a lot of people complaining that their OEM WD drives had failed. I know Dell uses other brands also, including Maxtor, but nearly all the hard drive complaints seemed to be with WD's. You probably browse tech forums - pay attention to the brand when people complain about drive problems. WD complaints probably outnumber any other brand 2:1. I'm convinced that if WD didn't have such a lucrative OEM segment, they'd be done. In fact, if their OEM's have to keep putting up with the kind of failure rates that they seem to, I don't know how much longer they'll have that. Cheap unit prices only carry you so far when you cost your customers a bundle in support.
 
Stilgar

Stilgar

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I bought a maxtor fireball somethingy 30gig drive in either october or november, 2002. I'm not sure which. It didn't last 10 months. That's all I'll say because I'm teh noob tech man o_O
 
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Balton

Balton

The Beast of Worship
Mar 6, 2001
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JTRipper said:
Sorry, I still can't agree there. The first year I started doing freelance tech support to supplement my income, I was tending about 3 dozen systems on a regular basis. Many of them had been built or purchased within a year or two before I started. There were 6 hard drive failures that year, 5 (out of 7) WD's and an old Connor. 3 of the WD's hadn't outlasted their 1 year warranty, and one, as I mentioned, WD wouldn't even replace. I swapped 3 of the remaining 4 WD's into older systems that the owner was selling and washed my hands of WD.

The next year two Maxtors (of about 20) and two IBM's went down (of 6 - they were aging SCSI units in a light duty server). One Maxtor was pretty new (replaced a WD the previous year), the other was probably a few years old. I've had one more failure since then - the last WD (a warranty replacement from the first year). There's a couple Seagates and Samsungs in the mix somewhere, but they haven't been a problem yet. Those kind of statistics don't speak to me of luck.

As you say, every drive will wear and fail, but WD's just seem to do it far too fast and often for my taste. I was researching a problem with a Dell not long ago, and I found a lot of people complaining that their OEM WD drives had failed. I know Dell uses other brands also, including Maxtor, but nearly all the hard drive complaints seemed to be with WD's. You probably browse tech forums - pay attention to the brand when people complain about drive problems. WD complaints probably outnumber any other brand 2:1. I'm convinced that if WD didn't have such a lucrative OEM segment, they'd be done. In fact, if their OEM's have to keep putting up with the kind of failure rates that they seem to, I don't know how much longer they'll have that. Cheap unit prices only carry you so far when you cost your customers a bundle in support.
Click to expand...

my current hd: western digital "caviar". the date on it says 26. sep. 2000 (ergo:almost 3 years old)
the hd in itself is ok, it's just too small
I'll look into the suggested hd's soon. I hope my little hardware shop has got some good offer for me :)

any ideas on how I can save my most important data for when I do a fresh windows instalation?
 
Bot_40

Bot_40

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Well I got 2 old maxtor drives, one is 5 years old and the other is 3 years old. Never had any problems with either (touchwood)
(That's on my old pc that I used about 10 hours a day every day up until about a month ago :con: )
 
Rukee

Rukee

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May 15, 2001
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I only had one HD fail so far, an IBM that broke the table inside or something....all formating utilities see and format the whole 20 gigs, but when you load windows, it only sees 1.9gigs. :hmm:
 
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