Hard drive

[undyingking]

I need to get a new hard drive for my PC. I've not bought one for around 3 years, and that mfr (Maxtor) doesn't even exist any more... any of you bought one recently, or otherwise kept up with devpts? Who's good these days?

Internal drives mostly seem to be SATA now, which am I right in thinking isn't back-compatible with my ATA motherboard? But maybe I should be considering an external one instead -- how practical is it to use such as an actual working drive, rather than just for backup etc?

Any thoughts / recs / etc welcome!

Comments

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

The external vs. internal thing -- it may depend just how much data you're looking to shift around. I tend to use my external drives for backup etc. but I think rotwang actually uses at least one as a "working" drive (he may be able to elucidate further on this). I probably wouldn't use an external drive as a "working" drive on my desktop PC, given that a lot of what I do on it involves working with large files (photos) but if you were mostly working on smaller files it might work.

Can't remember what we bought last time for hard drives but it might have been Samsung (they were 1TB drives, anyhow), and that was six months or so ago.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

The one that's currently failing is a Samsung one, the only such I've bought -- although it is about six years old, so I can let them off that I guess.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

You can get SATA cards for plugging into your PCI slots, although I'd be surprised if you really couldn't get an IDE drive (scan.co.uk go up to 500 Gig Western Digital drives for 60 quid, plus shipping).

I moved all my video and mp3's onto external drives a while ago (a 500 Gig and 320 gig drive respectively). There's no real performance requirement on those, and the setup was perfectly adequate. It broke sometime after I upgraded again: the 500 Gig drive failed, because I moved it (so internal drives are more reliable, simply because they're less likely to be moved).

I'm now running all my media off a NAS drive (which may be overkill for you), but the 100 meg ethernet (with contention!) is still enough. It's a bit slow when I want to reindex all the files.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Oh, there are plenty of ATA drives around, that's not a problem -- it was just about whether I can future-proof by getting a SATA drive that can later be transferred painlessly to any putative new PC.

[rotwang.livejournal.com]

I use an additional, effectively _internal_ (SATA), drive in an expansion bay on my laptop for running virtual machine images (under VMWare) because external USB drives are much too slow for such an intensive application. For just playing MP3s and so forth I find USB drives fine, however.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I would be using it for working on documents and that kind of thing, so transfer speed not utterly crucial but would be annoying if it was significantly slower than what I've been used to.

[chrisvenus]

Is this a main system drive or just an additional storage space one?

Personally I'd be thinking about getting a SATA card for my computer and getting an internal drive. That will, I'd have thought, give better performance than a USB connected one. That having been said I'd also advise checking your motherboard to confirm whether it has SATA connectors on it or not. I don't think having ATA connectors on it necessarily means it doesn't have SATA ones.

Not really got any recs for brands at at the moment though, sorry.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

It's to be a subsidiary system drive as it were, ie. it won't be running Windows or apps, but it will have a load of working project files that are being worked on in a 'live' type way.

Good point, I'll check the motherboard for secret SATA¹ connectors! Although it's six years old and was pretty cheapie then, so I wouldn't expect it.

---

1 It gives you 5MB worth of data, but you don't know who it came from.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Manufacturer-wise I recommend Seagate. My previous machine had a pair of Seagate Barracuda drives as a RAID-0 array. That's the low-reliability way round, where it's twice as fast but either disk failing will screw your data. And after years of extremely heavy use, the whole setup is still working as well as the day I bought it.

(Several of my earlier machines also had Seagate drives, which also never failed.)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[smiorgan.livejournal.com]

I have 4 Seagate harddrives which seem to be fine, although Windows XP is getting picky about accessing them - but I think that's a problem with my installation, linux and windows 7 are fine. The oldest is a 40Gb barracuda IV, still works.

Both Seagate and WD (and Maxtor I think) offer a 5 year warranty

I'd recommend getting a PCI SATA card for future proofing. Also SATA cables are easier to route (and you can get some cables which are right-angled, which works in my PC case). There are a couple of caveats if you've not used a SATA drive before

- they need a different power connector, but it's easy to get molex to SATA adaptors
- the tabs to attach power and data cables are tiny and some people have reputedly snapped them - never happened to me though
- if you want to use it as a boot drive (assume you do if the other is failing) then check the BIOS supports booting from add-in cards (I have a v. old Intel board that doesn't appear to)
- if you do a clean install you may need to load SATA drivers on a floppy disk during the install, however
- I used Seagate tools to migrate the old hard disk to the new one each time and it worked very well, and I never had to muck about with floppy disks

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks for that, useful stuff. Especially the bit about checking the BIOS, that could easily have become a source of frustration.