My HD is dying?

[MattHaX]

Hi,

Last night my Windows locked up and the HD was no longer detected in BIOS but the HD still had normal power going to it. So I opened up my case and made sure all the cables were in properly by pulling them out and pushed them back in again. I rebooted the PC and the drive was detected again (PHEW!). When I got back in Windows, I checked SMART status with SpeedFan, and to my amazement, the fitness is no longer 100% which it was before. The report is here...

http://www.hddstatus.com/hdrepshowreport.php?ReportCode=65160&ReportVerification=3A89C491.

The overall fitness for this drive is 88%.
The overall performance for this drive is 71%.

Which leads me to believe the drive is on it's way out. It does not owe me anything though, as I have had it for a few years now and it has been knocked about quite a bit as well when being transfered to differant PC's.

So I am looking at a new hard drive. I am currently seeing 2 possible candidates:

Western Digital Caviar SE 250GB 2500KS SATAII 7200rpm 16MB Cache, or Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 SATAII NCQ 3Gb/s 250GB 8MB Cache OEM.

(Got a SN25P which supports SATAII so do not worry about that.)

Could anyone be kind enough to comment on all of the above and advise which is the best hard drive for me to get please?

 

[smids]

For a nice reliable drive, then the seagate. The WD is probably faster but Seagate have improved their speed a lot recently. Seagate are just the most reliable drives so if that's what you need (at the expense of a tiny amount of speed), then that is the way to go.