Hard drive choice

[Veramocor]

Hey,

Going to be building a new computer and I need some advice on harddrives.

I want:

SATA (I'd prefer NCQ)
7200 RPM
at least 8 meg cache
between 100-160 GB
at least a 3 year warrantee
and I'd like the quietest drive possible with those above attributes.

I've been looking at the Seagate. Any idea what the difference between these two are (I think the 2nd one just has NCQ)? Any other suggestions for drives which would be better?

Seagate Drive 1

Seagate Drive 2

Thank you,

Veramocor

 

[LED]

Get the Seagate 160GB Barracuda 7200.7 7200RPM SATA with NCQ Hard Drive, Model ST3160827AS, OEM one

 

[shortylickens]

I know this issue has been covered before and I may get reamed for saying it but:

I cant reccommend a SATA drive for installing an OS. They dont always boot properly. It depends on your motherboards BIOS and chipset but I dont think we are at the point where PATA can be eliminated yet.
I have two systems each with a mix of several SATA and PATA drives. I use small PATA drives for the OS installations and use the big Serial drives for game installs and misc. file storage.

All my important utility programs are on the parallel drives too. Just in case WinXP goes nuts and starts to ignore my SATA drive. I have had a few instances in the past year where the disk manager wont acknowledge my SATA and tells me the drive needs to be reinitialized (or something else stupid). I usually lose my files unless I use FileScavanger and move them around. Then I reformat it with a clean NTFS and start again. I still like SATA because it frees up PATA channels for optical and Zip drives.

 

[akira34]

Go with Drive 2.

As for shorty's comments about SATA drives 'don't always boot properly'... IF you have a good mobo that's NOT an issue. I've been booting off of SATA drives since the word go on my current rig without issue. Also, IF you get good drives, you won't have to worry about the OS not recognizing them.

I won't recommend anyone get WD SATA drives since I had a pair of those fail on me in far too short a time frame (under 3 months). Got them replaced with a pair of Seagate NCQ drives and those have NO issues.

Currently, I'm booting from a SATA RAID array made up of a pair of non-NCQ Seagate 160GB drives (RAID 0) that boots without issue. I have the other pair of Seagate SATA 250GB (with NCQ) drives for additional storage. At some point in the not too distant future I intend on getting another pair of the 250GB drives and making them a single, large, array. I will be both booting from that array and keeping all my files in it. This will be a RAID 0 array too, since I'll need the space.

As for shorty losing files while moving files... There's something wrong with his system. This is NOT the norm in any way, shape or fashion. I've been using SATA drives for over a year and not once have I had that issue. Then again, I've also been using [primarily] Seagate SATA drives. With their 5 year warranty, it's hard to go wrong.

Of course, no matter WHAT you have for a drive type, if the data on it is critical you better have some kind of back-up solution in place. Even if it's just burning dvd's of data every so often...

 

[Cheesetogo]

GO on newegg and read all the reviews for the motherboard you want to get and see if anyone has any problems with detecting sata. It seems that alot of asus boards have that problem (if I remember correctly), so definetly read the reviews.

 

[Traire]

Originally posted by: LED
Get the Seagate 160GB Barracuda 7200.7 7200RPM SATA with NCQ Hard Drive, Model ST3160827AS, OEM one

All you need is a floppy drive and the drivers t hat come with your mobo. Put Windows CD in and start installation screen. At the beggining of the installation process, windows will prompt you to load 3rd party drivers. Put floppy in and load the SATA drivers. After that, everything should run just like it does with PATA drieves.

 

[shortylickens]

Perhaps I should have been clearer with my info. The drive had NO problems while moving files. It was always on startup. I would go to My Computer and the drive would be gone.
Then in Disk Manager I would get a bunch of silly suggestions about reinitializing the disk.

I too had problems with the WD's. Had one that died in a month and one that is still going after almost a year.
I moved to hitachi and have been very pleased.