Need Advice on replacing hard drive

[MisterPresident]

The hard drive in my secondary rig Dell Dimension 4300s ( 1.6 P4 640MB SDRAM 20GB GeForce2Ti) has been crapping out lately. I wasn't home, but my sister told me she heard some loud, metallic scraping noises. I started getting BSoD "Unmountable boot volume"

I ran recovery console, chkdsk /p, chkdsk /r and fixboot, and got it into Windows. Luckily, I got everything backed up.

Anyways, knowing the harddrive is on the fritz, what do I need to replace it... or should I even bother? The case is slimline, and uses a "1-inch?high IDE hard drive" which is presumably smaller than regular drives.

Is it likely this thing will crap out again?

Would it even be worth the cost of getting a new slimline HD, as I haven't seen many?

Where does one go about buying a "1-inch?high IDE hard drive"

(I'm thinking these are laptop drives... as it looks pretty small, and I don't think there would be a third HD form factor)

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: MisterPresident
The hard drive in my secondary rig Dell Dimension 4300s ( 1.6 P4 640MB SDRAM 20GB GeForce2Ti) has been crapping out lately. I wasn't home, but my sister told me she heard some loud, metallic scraping noises. I started getting BSoD "Unmountable boot volume"

I ran recovery console, chkdsk /p, chkdsk /r and fixboot, and got it into Windows. Luckily, I got everything backed up.

Anyways, knowing the harddrive is on the fritz, what do I need to replace it... or should I even bother? The case is slimline, and uses a "1-inch?high IDE hard drive" which is presumably smaller than regular drives.

Is it likely this thing will crap out again?

Would it even be worth the cost of getting a new slimline HD, as I haven't seen many?

Where does one go about buying a "1-inch?high IDE hard drive"

(I'm thinking these are laptop drives... as it looks pretty small, and I don't think there would be a third HD form factor)

Most hard drives are 1-inch drives (or less, in the case of some single-platter Maxtors at least).

If you like quiet-running drives, consider a Seagate 7200.7 drive but do pay attention to the interface... you want one with an 80-pin ooops, a 40-pin, my bad 😱 ATA100 or ATA133 interface, like the drive in this photo, not a Serial ATA ("SATA") drive. If other factors are equal, a drive with an 8MB cache is more desirable than a drive with a 2MB cache, too.

Hope that helps 🙂

 

[mechBgon]

Here's the 40GB Seagate 7200.7, by the way: link, about $60. They aren't very fast, but if you wanted fast you wouldn't have a P4 with SDR SDRAM, now would you 😉 An acceptable drive for light usage, anyway, and very quiet too.

 

[Pariah]

you want one with an 80-pin ATA100 or ATA133 interface, like the drive in this photo,

40 pin. 80 wire. If he looks for an 80 pin drive, he'll end up with a SCSI drive.

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: Pariah

you want one with an 80-pin ATA100 or ATA133 interface, like the drive in this photo,

40 pin. 80 wire. If he looks for an 80 pin drive, he'll end up with a SCSI drive.

Ooops! Good catch, thanks Pariah 😛

 

[MisterPresident]

So I'm assuming this screeching and scratching for sure means the hard drive is basically gone?

Also, if it helps, here are the tech specs on the drive.

The dimensions come out to 4inch width, 5.75 inch length and .75 inch height, for what it's worth.

Also, in a nutshell, what's EIDE/ATA/DMA/UDMA.... I know I'm know expert on computer hardware, but I never thought buying a drive could be so complex!

 

[Tostada]

It's not complex. Any standard hard drive (IDE) will fit in your computer and work fine.

All those things you're seeing are just old standards for hard drives. Modern IDE drives are all ATA/100 or ATA/133, both using Ultra DMA.

The standards IDE -> EIDE -> ATA -> ATA/33 -> ATA/66 -> ATA/100 -> ATA/133 are all downward compatible and all use the same cable. I have heard of some drives being a little slower on old machines if you don't set a jumper to force them into ATA/33 or ATA/66, though.

 

[Bucksnort]

ATA 100=DMA 5, ATA 133=DMA 6 etc. DMA 5 or ATA 100 drives can transport data at a max of 100 meg per second. DMA 6 at 133 megs\sec.