HDD Replacement Time

[Wing Commander MAD]

So recently my computer has been freezing and locking up during OS boot. This has happened in non cpu/gpu intensive apps so I'm doubting its a heat issue. After some looking on the web, it's looking like my HDD is dying, not surprising considering it and both my disk drives are about 6 years old, and it's certainly seen heavy use. I had a local computer shop gut the computer and replaced everything but the HDD and optical disk drives about 1.5-2 years ago, so I'm doubting it's one of the newer parts. I'm really not sure of the model of HDD as it was an OEM drive.

Can anyone recommend a good HDD for gaming? Solid state is out of the question now, and I really can't afford anything too expensive (I'm looking in the $50-$100, $150 max). Basically, I'm looking for something that is equivalent or prefferably a bit better than my 6 year old 250GB HDD that was a good, though not excellent, for gaming at the time. Depending on my employment situation I'd like to look into building a new gaming rig from scratch at some time in the next year or so and will probably give this one to my brother, so I'm not looking for anything too elaborate. The computer has the standard 3.5 inch drive bay and I have this motherboard. Also, I'm a little leary about bare drives, as I generally like to have the documentation and the software from the hardware manufacturer if possible. Is there any particular reason I shouldn't get a bare drive?

Finally, since this is my first hardware installation, other than expansion cards like GPUs/sound cards and RAM, anything in particular I should be aware of while doing this?

[Mr Bean]

If you want retail your paying an extra 20$ for no good reason since retail boxes for hard drives typically consist of a hard drive cable (1$) and a one page booklet in ten languages you can download off their website anyway. You might get a longer warranty but typically not anymore.

For your price range and request, here you go a Western Digital 1 TB 7200 RPM drive with a 64meg Cache, short of a 10,000 RPM drive or Solid state your not going to get anything better.
80$ plus shipping (Which is free)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136533
Don't worry about the fact it's SATA 6 gb, it's backwards completable with 3 gb you have on your board.

[phongn]

Buy a modern 7200RPM HD. Done.

[Wing Commander MAD]

Thanks Mr. Bean, looks good. Ordered.