Computer Help-- imminent hard drive failure :-(

You can get a Western Digital, which is the best brand IMO, for about $75. It will come with the software that will take care of all the partitioning, formatting and file transfers for ya. I believe the software is called Lifeguard Tools.

 

I second the Western Digital. They make a "special edition" that has the 8mb cache thats very nice and zippy.

 

I third that opinion..

You are on borrowed time with your current drive, and if you dont get a new one hooked up and copy your data over..you may lose some of it.

I have had real good luck with WD drives, I have installed over 30 of them over the last couple of years and not a one has failed(yet)..

If you dont have experience with installing hardware, find a friend who does..

 

kpsta,

You can always just install a new OS on the new hard drive from scratch and use your old hard drive as a slave/backup until it poops out, or you can go ahead and transfer the files over.

Either way should work.

 

I have used Maxtor's and have really good luck with them...

I realize you've already bought one, but just thought I would throw this out...

also, backup, backup, backup...

I backup all my personal stuff, favorites, music, image files, about twice a month (CDR's are cheap!)

Programs, I don't worry about, cause I have most of those so that I can re-install them if I have too, same with games... If I save anything from game files, it's my current saved games...

 

Are you thinkin of using the Firewire as a primary drive?

Does your computer even support booting from Firewire?

Get a IDE drive for your main drive (OS,programs, etc) and get a Firewire for your storage...no problem.

There are some nice 200G drives out there..should be plenty to hold your mp3s..

I saw one at newegg for about 270 or so..you could probably find one for less if ya really looked..

 

There is a nice WD firewire drive (120G 7200rpm) for 260 or so..

Tomshardware rated it as a good drive...

but they also say that there isnt that big of a difference between firewire and usb2.0..

you might want to research to ensure you get the best performance for the money..

 

I heard on the show The Screen Savers the other day that HP is the #1 selling computer in the world, and in the U.S. Dell is #1, which one is better?

 

My understanding (which isn't firsthand experience, I only have USB 1.1) is that USB 2.0 is actually faster in bursts, but that FireWire provides a higher sustained throughput, which is probably better for an external hard drive.

Does anyone have any experience of this?

 

http://www6.tomshardware.com/mobile/20020827/mobile_data-01.html

good place for all your hardware questions..

 

You can hook up both hard drives and copy the data.

WD is good, but my experience has been mixed. Of about 80 that we installed two years ago, 10 failed in the first year. I haven't had any bad ones since though.

Personally, I'm a fan of Seagate. I've only had one go bad out of about 60 that I've installed in the past year.

A few years ago, Maxtor's quality was awful. Really, really bad. Both Maxtors I have that are 2+ years old went bad. But now, Maxtor is awesome. Of the new generations of drives, I've put in about 40 and had no bad ones over the course of a year.

Whatever you do, don't buy an IBM drive . . .

 

I can vouch for that. My IBM Desktar has bad boot sectors and is on the way out. Apparently, this problem is very common among these drives(based on my web research). Mine is still under warranty, though. I just haven't done anything about it yet. It's only two years old and is already crapping out. It has faster seek times(a whole 2 nanoseconds...wow) but what is the point if it craps out on you. I'm pretty pissed about it. Can't you tell?

 

Yeah, when I built my last computer, I got an IBM 60GXP, as I used to own two IBM drives that were awesome so I assumed the IBMs were still good. About 1 month after I bought it, there was a story on slashdot about how people were having high failure rates. Three months later, mine died. The thing is sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I haven't bothered RMA-ing it because I wouldn't use the new drive anyways. Turns out, the failure rate on these is HUGE. People who have not had any problems are few and far between.

 

Some Maxtors come with a lifetime warranty. Call your dealer to see if you can get it repaired. You'll most likely lose all your information stored in the HD, but it's worth a try.

 

your ide cable connected to your current harddrive probaly has a open connector on it.

Use the second connector to hook up the new harddrive and then format, partition, etc.

Then simply copy all of your data files that you want to keep from your old harddrive to your new one.

If your cable doesn't have two connectors then you can buy one that does for about 4 bucks from any hardware store.

You don't even have to screw it in to the computer, just hook up the cable and it will auto detect it.