Are all hard drives decent?

[dvtimes]

Just popping out to but a new 250gb hard drive.

I use them to store films on (as a 2nd drive), then when they are almost full, I simply rip out the drive and put a new one in. At £50 or so each time its not that expensive.

But are there any brands better than any others these days?

I tend to opt for around 200 gb, simply as smaller drives tend to be only a few pounds cheaper, so often not worth buying, but also I do not want bigger in case the drive fails. I much rather loose 200gb of data than 300gb if you understand my logic.

Also on this subject, how much should you spend on a decent pc these days, and what spec?

I would sugest that no less than 1gb of memory (as its so cheap), but these days there is different types and unlike the old days when a processer was easy to understand (As in you knew a 400 486 priocesser was faser that a 200 486), these days I could not say what processer is more powerfull than another.

[ApacheAnderson]

are you getting SATA or PATA?

[ApacheAnderson]

2 x SATA 300 disk in Raid 0 configurations will give you the best consumer disk performance currently. But you double your risk of a hard disk crash, so Raid 1+0 woudld be the best option, but you would need 4 disk for that, but if one disk died then you just need to pop in another one to get all your data back.

[dvtimes]

ide i think.

[dvtimes]

200GB Maxtor DiamondMax
7,200RPM / 8MB Buffer

This is the last one I got but they are out of stock.

[dvtimes]

are you getting SATA or PATA?

To me that just sounds like somthingg on an exotic indian menu.

I will order the pata with chips please, and a side order of rice.

I did have a nice sata the other nice, full of cream.

[ApacheAnderson]

If you have a spare PCI slot then pick up a SATA card and drive, it won't cost you a great deal more than an IDE drive and yo'ull get a pretty big peformance improvement.

Standard IDE is PATA.

[ApacheAnderson]

oh and you'll probably need a power converter for it as well if your PSU doesn't have the right connection.

[dvtimes]

Ther pc I have is a bit old.

I realy need a new one.

But what put me off is that all the softwear is on my old pc and I do not fancy loading it again to a new pc. For one thing I have probably lost the softwear passwords.

But the price of pc's are very cheap at the moment.

They may even be cheaper in a few months (pc's with xp on them) when they bring out the new windows.

But then again I think I will try to hold back another 6 months while the new windows pc's are out and have there bugs fixed.

[redwhiteandblue]

SATA - serial ATA - is faster than IDE but slower than SCSI. Most motherboards from the last year or so will have onboard SATA. However, there's a gotcha to be aware of - hard drives are now being sold that use SATA 2 (or SATA 300), and won't work with SATA 1 (or SATA 150) motherboards without a jumper setting to slow them down. Which I discovered recently when buying a Seagate Barracuda 250Gb drive.

The guys at the shop warned me off buying Maxtors. They recommended the Seagate. This was to replace a WD Caviar which expired, that's the second WD Caviar that had failed on me although the first one may have been the fault of the power supply. Always always use a decent power supply in your PC!

[SGS]

We are using Samsung Sata's now for internals and are very pleased with them. Quiet, fast and reliable.

[wankmaster]

Started to read this thread, but it all seemed a bit nerdy to me, so I stopped.

[dvtimes]

Started to read this thread, but it all seemed a bit nerdy to me, so I stopped.

got to admit it did get nerdy.

all i asked was what brand and i got the nerdy answer.

i think swome people need to get out more.

[wankmaster]

It was only cos I'd just read the other thread about nerds not being allowed to breed, that put me off, otherwise I might have struggled thru it.

All I can say is Seagate always seemed OK, but I don't have any nerdy data to back that assertion up.

[ristac]

I have been looking at some CCTV equipment, decent sellers of this use Seagate drives in the DVDR remembering that images are being recorded over and over again. None of them have Western Digital whish says something..

[gawdi]

Have a look here.... Disk recovery experts recommended manufacturers..

https://www.essdatarecovery.com/recommend.asp

I like western digital myself

[Damian]

Seagate, seagate, seagate.

Really, don't touch anything else!

Esp MaxFlaw.

[Bradderzzz]

I've had three maxtors blow in more in the last five years. They overheat way to easily.

Seagates have always been my choice.