Need hard drive advice

[kormer]

Right now I have a 17GB ide hard drive thats getting close to full and am looking to expand with a second hard drive. I mostly use my rig for gaming, so I'm willing to take a small hit in space to get more performance. I'm looking to spend about $150-$200 on my new drive. Any advice as for what brand/model to get that has a reliable track record? The 17GB one I have now is totally generic, no brand at all on it and has worked fine, but thats no garuntee for future performance.

 

[Rick014]

I've had good luck with Maxtor drives. make sure the drive you get is 7200 rpm.
The extra drive speed will make the games load faster

 

[Stig]

I moved house recently.. my computer was dropped from about 4 feet...

I was upgrading anyway.. however, I still have 2 of the hard drives from that system in use.. the Fujitsu which plays up and shows bad sectors then doesn't show bad sectors.. and a Quantumn - which is fine and dandy.

The Quantumn had already been dropped earlier in the year - when I was packing stuff to leave uni.. about 4ft again...

In the future I will buy only Quantumn hard drives. I am sold.

G

 

[Pariah]

For $150-200 you can get any IDE drive on the market but the Maxtor 160GB. Your options would be a bit clearer if you had a certain capacity you were looking for. A good recommendation would be the 80GB Western Digital SE drive for about $115. Best of class performance and probably plenty of capacity for your needs.

"In the future I will buy only Quantumn hard drives. I am sold."

Quantum doesn't make HD's anymore. They sold out to Maxtor over a year ago.

 

[kormer]

Just checked my mobo's specs and heres what the manufacturer has to say: "We've tested it up to a 40GB hard drive, but it should support up to 60GB." Earily vague I know. The mobo is an FIC SD11. I guess I'll just play it safe and get a maxtor 40GB 7200RPM drive unless somebody has another suggestion. I plan on building a whole new rig in another year so the new drive will probably become the main drive of the next machine. I would've liked double that capacity, but thats what I get for buying a cheap mobo. On a side note, any idea where a usb drive would figure into the equation? Would that necessarily be restricted by the mobo? I could just install games to the smaller 17gig drive and use a larger USB drive for storage of mass items like mp3's and movies.

 

[BD231]

I would not go with WD unless noise is not an issue, most WD's I've heard in the past (including the latest 120gb Special) have had spindle noise that compares to SCSI drive's. I would go with a Maxtor, Samsung or Seagate drive in that order. If you get a maxtor try and get a fluid bearing version. Most dont suspect their IDE drive's to be the culprit of a noisy computer untill they get quiet case fan's, but believe me, some IDE drive's make a fair amount of the noise that slowly drives a person nuts.

 

[Stig]

Is there any way of servicing the bearings in a hard drive?

Ok so tolerances will be high... but is there any way of injecting grease into the bearing?

Prob a silly question.