Replacement Hard Drive

[Tirak]

So after about a year and a half my Western Digital hard drive has packed it in. I've gone through all the trouble shooting I can and it's got to be a hardware issue, so now I'm in the market for a new one. At first, the Seagate Barracuda caught my eye:

Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

It was cheap, stored a lot and seemed to be a good idea, but after doing some more reading it looks like it's pretty frail. Can someone help me find a good fast hard drive, at least 1TB for under 100 bucks that is going to last? I'm not exactly the most computer savvy guy so any help would be much appreciated. Thanks

[Pedz]

what western digital drive did you have, no doubt they have at least a 3 year warranty.. Also black caviar WD HDD's are the most reliable of their bunch. Not sure about US prices, but theyre ~?60 for 1TB, and well, they're damn fast..

[Tirak]

The hard drive came with the computer, I don't know if that would make a difference where the warranty is concerned, and the computer itself is out of warranty.

It's a 640 gb 7200 rpm SATA 3Gb/s, I believe it's a Blue Caviar.

I've heard that Western Digital's aren't that great, but my information may be a little out of date. The person I normally talk to about it says that Western Digital's are the low end of what Seagate offers after Seagate bought them out.

[Pedz]

That guy is misinformed... western digital black caviar drives are the top products. Also they can't be low end producers if they made the velociraptor hdd (10k rpm). However, they do have budget lines which are not as good. Such as the blue and green flavours.

[Mad-Mike]

Try a Samsung HDD

I had one in my old setup and it lasted 4 years (still works, waiting to sell old comp.)

Here's one the same price and the same link..
Newegg.com - SAMSUNG EcoGreen F2 HD154UI 1.5TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

[Tirak]

Bear with me, as I'm not that good with the guts of computers anymore , but I've been doing some more digging and apparently there's problems with larger sized hard drives because there's multiple disks, or something like that. As I understand it, more disks = less reliability. So I've been thinking about instead picking up two 500 GB drives, maybe something like the Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar Black WD5002AALX 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive. Any thoughts on this? The comp I need to replace the drive on is my main. I use it for everything from gaming to video editing and classwork.

[Pedz]

Sounds all good to me, if you want 100% data protection from dying HDD's, buy yourself two, and set up a RAID 1 stripe. There are guides on how to do this (its pretty simple really) all over google etc.

Basically Raid 1 mirrors the HDD's so if one fails, the other can pick up the work and has all the data saved etc... But I doubt a WD BC would fail, and they come with a 5 year warranty as well =]

[LITOralis.nMd]

I own 4 WD Caviar Black drives.

Was just poking around, so I'll let you know a quirk you won't notice until it's too late.

The Caviar Black will no longer (properly) support HARDWARE RAID, but will still do fine in SOFTWARE RAID, this was a purely business decision by Western Digital to force corporate customers to buy the enterprise equivalent drives called (Caviar Black Raid Edition) to the Caviar Black drives,for as much as 60% more per Gigabyte storage. THe standard WD CB and the WD CB RE are basically the same hardware, with different firmware. WD just decided to stop supporting physical RAID firmware to make more money...



Also, depending on your PC manufacturer your prior drive might still be under warranty.