need new harddrive, but which one?

benji182

benji182

benji182

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hey all, new to these forums but after a few mins of browsing everyone here seems to know loads about computers.


anyways...


i've got a 160Gb Maxtor hard drive (i think its a DiamondMax 9) its about a year old or so anyways and i have several partitions on it like windows, programs, games, music etc....

i've now alsmost filled all of the partitions up and i'm looking to start a fresh start on a new hard drive. i was reading a magazine in WH smiths a few months back called custom PC as it had a hard drive reviews bitty.

they basically said that the Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 was the best (but only if SATA2 mode was set, now my motherboard only supports SATA)
the next best hard drive was the Samsung Spinpoint P120S 250Gb which was best in SATA. this drive was also the quietest drive out of the lot they tested and was even quieter when writing than most where when idle. (that has a big appeal to me as my current harddrive rattles around like a tin full of nuts and bolts).

i am looking for a hard drive for about £70 (inc VAT) that was 250GB and was wondering if you guys think i should go for the samsung spinpoint or something else?

i know that the new raptor X is like the daddy but that doesn't offer enough storage space or an offordable price lol.


many thanks :)



*edit: sorry, forgot to add, i would also be using my current harddrive as like a back up or something. its not called a slave drive anymores as its not IDE and has no jumpers so dunno how it quite works but i'd like to copy my music over to the new hard drive and then format the whole drive (removing partitions and just having my home DVD/videos stored on it and stuff) is that possible?
 
Last edited:
williamw11 said:
Samsung for the win.

Yes but being a maxtor I wouldnt trust it according to the number of failures recently.
Click to expand...


wow, only just made myself a cuppa-tea and 3 replies already :)

thanks guys for advise i think i'll be going for the spinpoint 250GB as that seems to be a pretty sound hard drive.

whats up with maxtor hard drives as of late? they not last very long or something?

just read the RAID sticky thing and although its helpful its a lil complex lol

what raid should i go for with a samsung spinpoint 250GB with and a maxtor 160GB??

also, do you guys partition your hard drives or is that kinda an old IDE thing thats just dissmissed now days :-/
 
gr1mey said:
The Samsung Spinpoints are the best for silence.

Would also consider a Seagate Barracuda.
Click to expand...


Also throw a Western Digital into that mix IMO.

Silence=Samsung
Reliability=Seagate
Good balance betweeen silence/speed/reliability=WD

Edit: And yeah, really sort your sig out. Its breaking the forum rules. Have a read of the FAQ.
 
benji182 said:
...whats up with maxtor hard drives as of late? they not last very long or something?

just read the RAID sticky thing and although its helpful its a lil complex lol

what raid should i go for with a samsung spinpoint 250GB with and a maxtor 160GB??

also, do you guys partition your hard drives or is that kinda an old IDE thing thats just dissmissed now days :-/
Click to expand...

Maxtors have been gaining a bad rep recently for high failure rate, they're probably not quite as bad as the rumours make out but given the choice...

For a RAID you'll need 2 drives the same capacity (or lose part of the biggest drive in the array). With respect, it's best to stay away from RAID unless you have definite reasons for setting one up - there is a performance increase but it comes at the cost of increased complexity and it's more difficult to fix if it goes wrong.

Still a good plan to partition a drive, gives some performance increase and offers some level of protection to the operating system if you use a separate partition as a scratch disk. I personally don't like doing any heavy-duty disk writes (like video encoding, mps encoding etc) on my system partition. I also keep the swap file on a separate disk.
 
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