Going to buy a new Hard Drive.

Faynor

Hi there. The hard drive that came with this computer that I've had for about a year and a half has been fucked up since I've had it. After trying everything, my computer-smart friend (I know how to work a computer, but I don't know anything beyond that, if that makes sense. No clue what's going on in there) narrowed it down to something about a bad hard drive. Corrupt partitions, or something? I don't know. I can't remember what he said. It was a while ago.

Anyways, I've finally decided to buy a new one, and being that he no longer lives near me, I'll pretty much be walking into Best Buy hoping not to get screwed. All I know is I have a SATA connection type (SATA II, I think the a program said that he had me download to tell me, if that matters.) and I don't need much more than 100 gbs. What more do I need to know? What saying "I need an SATA Hard drive around 100 gbs" be enough, or will I need to know more?

I appreciate any help.

Daedalus

Don't go to Best Buy, or you will get screwed.

Buy it off of Newegg.com.

edit: list of SATA hard drives on Newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150014+1035915133&Configurator=&Subcategory=14&description=&Ntk=&SpeTabStoreType=&srchInDesc=

What's your budget? 100GB isn't a whole lot of space.

also, anecdotally, Seagate and Western Digital have always made reliable hard drives for me, while any Samsung drive I've ever owned has died after less than a year.

OremLK

Daedalus wrote: »

Don't go to Best Buy, or you will get screwed.

Buy it off of Newegg.com.

This. Also, don't be afraid to splurge a little. You can get a terabyte (1000gb) for $100 now, and it's pretty much the best value for your money. Terabyte drives are faster than most other drives, in addition to the whole tons of space thing.

But if you really only need 100gb, try something like this. (They typically come in either 80gb or 160gb these days, and the cheapest you can get a drive is around $40).

Daedalus

OremLK wrote: »

But if you really only need 100gb, try something like this. (They typically come in either 80gb or 160gb these days, and the cheapest you can get a drive is around $40).

for the record, this is $10 more and has twice as much space.

You get into really bad price/space ratios for very small drives, for whatever reason.

edit: on the more expensive end, I bought this monster a few weeks ago. It was ten dollars cheaper then (Black Friday) but it's still a good deal if you're looking to splurge a little.

OremLK

Yep, that's why I suggested the terabyte drives... they really do have the best price/gb ratio, in addition to better performance. Hard drives are an undernoticed bottleneck on PC performance, by the way. Not in games so much as everyday use--boot times, how long it takes software to start up, etc.

Daedalus

Yeah, I've seen that. (Ironically enough, hard disk speed doesn't really affect game performance at all outside of how long the load screen stays up.)

The Western Digital AAKS series has always been pretty good on speed. I've got the 640GB version in my desktop (in addition to that 1.5TB crazy drive, above), and it's been surprisingly fast. The reason terabyte drives are usually pretty fast is that it's a function of how densely the bits are "packed" on the drive platter. If you find a smaller drive that uses one or two high-density platters it'll be just as fast.

Faynor

I'd say my budgest is preferably under 100. Like right now I think my HD is 200 something but I've only used 30 in almost two years. But anyways, does New Egg usually ship fast? How do I know the HD will work for my computer? I sit hard to install them?

Daedalus

Faynor wrote: »

I'd say my budgest is preferably under 100. Like right now I think my HD is 200 something but I've only used 30 in almost two years. But anyways, does New Egg usually ship fast? How do I know the HD will work for my computer? I sit hard to install them?

1) $100 will buy you a lot of hard drive nowadays. Like I said earlier, I bought a 1.5TB hard drive (that's 1,500 gigabytes) for $120 on Black Friday. edit: This one costs fifty bucks and holds 320GB.

2) Newegg's default shipping usually takes around three days, or less if you live in or near New Jersey (where their main warehouse is located) or southern California (where their other warehouse is located).

3) This depends on your computer case, but it's usually pretty straightforward. Did your computer come with a manual for this sort of thing? (I haven't bought a prebuilt computer in years, but I understand some of them don't even come with a fucking manual these days, as if printing off a dozen pages and sticking it in the box would somehow break the company bank or something.) It's usually just a matter of disconnecting the SATA and power cables from the old drive, unscrewing the old drive from the case, screwing the new drive into the case, and connecting the SATA and power cables.

Oh, and if it's your only hard drive, you'll need to reinstall Windows and everything, of course.

Terrendos

I personally would not recommend Western Digital. Five years ago I helped my dad assemble a RAID 5 array of 5 Western Digital 200 gig drives, and within two years he had replaced every single one. I don't know if those drives just don't like RAIDs or what, but he switched to a different brand after the third failure, and now if I recall they're all Hitachi and not one of those has failed.

Crashtard

Also remember that "most" drive makers have a 2 year warranty that covers the drive if it goes bad. Get on their website and you can most likely get it replaced for free. I just did that with my brothers drive through seagate with success.

Daedalus

Eh, that's anecdotes for you. Although, come to think of it, I had a WD drive (that I was going to replace anyway, because it was tiny and IDE-based) fail after three years and change just recently.

Still, just make sure you stay away from Samsung; their drives are terrible.

edit: Crashtard, WD usually has a 3-year warranty and Seagate usually has a 5-year.

Faynor

What does a cache do? This one is well within my price range, and has double the cache.

Thanks for all the help so far.

Edit: Hitachi is a good brand, then? Would this be better?

Terrendos

For all I know it may have been that the WDs didn't respond well with the setup on my dad's computer, which was admittedly pretty unusual. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure the drives in this computer I'm using now are WD, and I've had them for at least 5-6 years. I'd say it's more important to make sure you get a good warranty.

Daedalus

Cache is where written files temporarily go before being written to the disk.

You will almost certainly never notice a difference with increased cache size for any modern hard drive.

edit: that WD drive you linked is from the AAKS series which, again anecdotally, I've had very good results with: I've got the 640GB version in my computer right now and it's very fast and very quiet.

Faynor

Alright, I'll order it tomorrow most likely. Thanks for all your respective helps!

Daedalus

if this is replacing the hard drive you used to have Windows on, you'd better get your install discs ready.

Deathwing

The Western Digital AAKS series has always been pretty good on speed. I've got the 640GB version in my desktop (in addition to that 1.5TB crazy drive, above), and it's been surprisingly fast. The reason terabyte drives are usually pretty fast is that it's a function of how densely the bits are "packed" on the drive platter. If you find a smaller drive that uses one or two high-density platters it'll be just as fast.

I have one of these 640GB WD AAKS drives going at the moment also.....does great, no problems whatsoever.

It's actually my second one - the first was a victim of my hulking 15-pound cat chasing his sibling across my desk last week, and tipping my tower off to slam on the floor. Survived long enough afterwards to grab the data off it, though.