Need advice - buying hard drive

[JudySmith]

How can I find a HD that will last? My Compaq Presario is 5 years old & has had heavy usage. I think the hard drive is going on the blink, due to alot of grinding noises.

I don't do gaming or multimedia.

Should I use Price Grabber?
What make, specs & price to look for?

 

[DaveSimmons]

If you're in the USA, Hot Deals forum (rebates) or newegg.com (pay a little more, no rebates).

Western Digital drives with "8 MB cache" have a 3-year warranty, most other drives only have a 1-year warranty.

Other than warranty, there isn't much reason to buy one brand over another since you don't need gaming / video editing performance, For every other use they're all the same.

People will say "I had horrible luck with Brand X," but you can find someone to say that about every brand.

 

[StraightPipe]

I would recomend a drive with 8mb cache, they are usually faster.

also if your concerned about your existing drive get a disk utility from the manufacturer to test your drive.(Ie: Maxtor has PowerMax ute)

5 year old drives that whine and grind dont usually last to much longer, i'd backup anything important.

spend a little time looking around, big stores like circuit city and best buy frequently have multiple rebates on hard drives (i just got an 80G WD800JB for $65 after rebates at CC)

 

[JudySmith]

Thanks both of you!

I forgot to add a major question, that is, by Hard Drive I meant the whole box as well, including maybe loaded with Win XP & good anti-virus program.
(now I have Win98, with Compaq's Red Disk of Hell).

Do they sell boxes complete with system & anti-virus? I don't need a monitor, keyboard or mouse. Just the box & WinXP. Is that obtainable?

P.S. Re: the grinding, I wonder why it is that the grinding noises only happen while I'm online, not offline.
I already ran PowerMax and it tested clean.

 

[Aganack1]

just buy a dell without a monitor. You dont need a new Hard drive you need a new computer with out a monitor. Dell has good deals from time to time. Just watch the deal forum and you should find something that suits you.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: Aganack1
just buy a dell without a monitor. You dont need a new Hard drive you need a new computer with out a monitor. Dell has good deals from time to time. Just watch the deal forum and you should find something that suits you.

Though a lot of the Hot Deals involve setting up a Small Business account and/or tracking down coupons that might or might not be ethical to use.

The Dell.com website is easy to find your way around and anything you buy (even the cheapest) will be much faster than what you have now. For your information, Dell Home has weekly specials that usually change every Thursday or Friday -- some weeks you get a mail in rebate, other weeks it's free shipping, a CD burner, extra memory, or a discounted LCD monitor. Since you don't want a monitor you might make sure to buy when the weekly special is not the LCD monitor upgrade.

Other than that, just make sure to get at least 256 MB of "memory", or maybe even 512. 128 MB of memory is not a good amount. Dell's current $499 "featured special" desktop includes a monitor but only 128 MB of memory -- to fix this you'd need to go to the main "desktops" section, click "choose 2400" choose the $499 system and "customize it."

Then change the "memory" to either 256 MB (or better 512 MB) and the monitor to "no monitor", price will either go down $40 or up $60 depending on how much memory you chose.

Unfortunately that all changes on Thursday after this week's specials expire 🙁

 

[sniperruff]

read my post: my WD1200JB has bad sectors

well lucky for me it has a 3 year warranty. warranty really matters when it comes to HD, even more than memory, since HD fails once in a while.

 

[StraightPipe]

oh, dell, gateway...

when you said hard drive you meant computer.

 

[dmw16]

Definatly check out dell. You can get a nice rig (compared to what you are running now) for a really good price. Although it has already been covered, the more opinions you read the better you may tend to feel about a decision. A lot of people on this forum would build a new computer...but for $499 you cant really beat Dell. I just went to Dell.com. If you go from their main page click "Desktops and Notebooks" then "Desktops" on the next page then "Choose Dimension Desktops" then "Home & Home Office" then all the way to the right "Choose 2400" then "Recommended Systems starting at $499" then under Base Model click "customize" and then go down the page a bit to memory and pick 256 (or 512 if you wanna spend the extra although you can upgrade more cheaply by just getting it from BB or CC when they are having a sale) and then go farther down and select "no monitor". It is $459 and has free shipping and free second bay CD-RW drive...cant really beat that.
-doug

 

[JudySmith]

OK everyone, thank you so much for your advice. I just ordered from Dell their 4600 deal which came to approx. $668 (including tax).

See, the 2400 deal would have come to about $620 once I'd have to add the $60 for 256MB, as well as another $60 for USB memory key. It would have come with monitor and speakers, but I already have a monitor & speakers.

Whereas the 4600 doesn't come with monitor & speakers, but it also includes the CD burners and free shipping, as well as higher quality specs.

I don't need a keyboard or mouse (I already have an extra mouse & 2 extra keyboards) but I'm getting them whether I need 'em or not. Oh well...

The reason I rushed to order is because their special expired tonight, so if I wouldn't have rushed, I'd have passed the deadline. I hope I did right! And I hope even more that my hard drive holds out so that I can get my data safely transferred - this grinding is driving me nutty banana bonkers!