Hard drive recommendation

Would you please give me brand recommendations for a hard drive? Either ones that are reliable or ones to stay away from. I'd like to keep my investment $100 or less since this is going into a computer scheduled for replacement in a couple years. (I hope!)

I have local built computer. Have recently updated CPU, memory, video card, and BIOS. (With help from this forum.) Now need to buy larger hard drive. Have checked on motherboard and bios sites and the latest bios update supports drives up to 136GB for a 16 head system.

I want to buy 120GB, EIDE hard drive. This would be the main drive. I'd make my present drive (works great, just too small now) a secondary. I think I understand I should buy a hard drive in a kit so everything is included for installation and for transferring data.

Am I on the right track here? Advise will be appreciated. Thanks.

 

Hey, Barbara-
Sounds like you're doing just fine as it is! If you stay with a well-known brand you should have no problems. There are people who swear by drives or swear at them, just as there are those who swear by / at Ford or Chevy. Take a look at TechBargains.com, where you can find out who has the lowest prices.

 

Western Digital, Maxtor, Seagate to name a few. Get a 7200 RPM (minimum) disk.

 

Thanks for response. Have been leaning towards Seagate or Maxtor. You verified that 7200 rpm should be minimum, which is what I was figuring.

I'll look for my best price and proceed.

These forums have been a wonderful source of help since I found this site.

 

I believe either Best Buy or Office Max, Staples or Office Depot (or two of these) have the 120gb Western Digital on sale through Saturday for around $60 after rebate. Check the Sunday ads

We've had great luck with WD

 

Do a google for "anandtech". That outfit seems to be on top of all the deals on computer, electronic, and office stuff. Not to mention some great tech forums.

 

Thanks all for the info.

I searched around and found that Best Buy has a Maxtor Ultra Series Drive Kit for $139.99 with a $30 rebate from Best Buy and a $30 rebate from Maxtor. It's 7200 rpm with 8mb cache. Since this will be my first hard drive installation, I really needed a kit with all the parts and instructions and diagrams..... . Trying to eliminate errors on my part.

It should be here by the week-end, so hopefully will have a bigger, faster drive running by next week.

 

That's all just hype - there's really nothing to changing a HD other than just changing it. You shouldn't need any special cables (other than maybe an 80-pin ribbon, as opposed to 40-pin.)

For your setup, if you want to make the new drive the Master, you will want to Ghost the old drive to the new one - basically this makes the new drive exactly like the old one. However, there's a major drawback to this - it makes the new drive exactly like the old one (problems and all.)

Then you can format the old drive and use it for your Slave drive.

BTW, Master and Slave is selected with the jumpers on the back of the drive.


Your best bet is probably just to install the new drive as Master, the old drive as Slave and then reinstall Windows fresh on the new drive, or upgrade if you want.

Good luck!

 

Okay, if I don't ghost the drives, then that means I have to re-install all my software on the new master drive? Several of those programs have been purchased thru downloading. Several have had update downloads. etc etc.....

I don't really have any problems with how everything is operating on my computer, so I was planning on ghosting. It should be safe to ghost if I don't have problems anyhow, right?

Thanks

 

Sure, you won't have any problems - it's just not the same as a clean install of Windows

Good luck!

 

You should be able to get all of the software again as long as the companies are still in business AND you are properly registered. Some companies are better than others. EG) WINZIP still has my original records from 5 years ago. I was able to re-download winzip (even the latest version). I have the original key codes, though.

Many of the updates are built on top of the previous version, so you would only need the latest.

Even if you do not have unlimited updates, old versions are usually available on the web sites.

Even if you ghost, I'd still work on being able to recover the software and be ready - expect the unexpected. You will be ok now, but next year???

 

Definitely take the 8mb drive if you can get it. Some brands offer a better warranty on the drives with 8mb cache and from personal experience you'll really notice a difference in performance. I bought my son a Western Digital 120GB with 8MB cache and it flies. Much quicker than anything else I've worked with.

 

BobF --

I've had this computer for over 5 years. A friend upgraded it about 3 years ago (motherboard, pentium processor, larger hard drive ) and now I've been doing this upgrade (faster processor, more ram, 3d video card, much larger hard drive ) over the past several months. During this time we sold our home, lived in a rental, built and moved into our new home. I'm still looking for all those "clearly labeled" boxes of computer software etc. I started out keeping orderly records of registration numbers and such, but lost control of it somewhere along the line.

As part of this upgrading and new house, I have vowed to keep my computer software and data organized. I figure I've been very lucky and that can't last forever.

kletkeman --

I did order the 8mb cache and it does have a better warranty. While researching I did see that the 8mb cache would give a lot more speed. Glad to hear that it made a big difference on your system.

Thanks. I will post back sometime next week after the smooth transition is over.

 

Barbara:

As opposed to Ghost, I would use xxcopy
Look here:
http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy10.htm

It's freeware for Win 98/ME.

Basically, you hook up the new drive as a slave. FDisk and format it. Start Windows. Open a DOS window.
Run xxcopy c: d: /clone from the command line. Let it finish, shut down, remove your original drive, make the new one the master. Reboot. Done.

I've used it a number of times and it's never let me down.