Advice requested on HDD purchase

[Faqa]

In my continual crusade to abuse the goodwill of knowledgeable G&C posters, I now ask for advice on a hard drive purchase I'm pondering.

Basically, my old 120GB hard drive is begining to burst at the seams, and I'd like to get a shiny new one to add to it.

So, my questions in order(note that I'm looking for a SATA drive, as my one IDE slot is used for my DVD burner):

- As far as performance goes - first of all, how important is it? I've always heard that hard drive performance is not terribly significant in the grand scheme of things, but still worth not overlooking. Secondly, what should I be looking for in a drive in terms of performance?

- What companies are worth looking at? Assume that I want a large-capacity drive, 500GB at least, and I'd like to hear reasons why I shouldn't buy a 1TB HDD(Worrying about space is a pain in the rear, and I'd like to get rid of it for a while), if any.

- Besides size and performance, what other criteria are worth looking at for the drive?

- Finally, for after I install it - how dangerous is it to just add it to my existing drives using Partition Magic or some such? I know it's reccomended to backup, but, realistically, what are the chances of a screw-up?

All general advice is also welcome, of course.

My thanks in advance for any answers.

[General Zod]

- As far as performance goes - first of all, how important is it? I've always heard that hard drive performance is not terribly significant in the grand scheme of things, but still worth not overlooking. Secondly, what should I be looking for in a drive in terms of performance?

Not terribly. HDDs are always the bottleneck given current limitations, but as long as all of your system components are fairly new it won't significantly impact things. You might get somewhat better performance out of a 7200rpm drive vs. a 5400 rpm one, but one is noisier than the other so that might be a factor.

- What companies are worth looking at? Assume that I want a large-capacity drive, 500GB at least, and I'd like to hear reasons why I shouldn't buy a 1TB HDD(Worrying about space is a pain in the rear, and I'd like to get rid of it for a while), if any.

Western Digital and Seagate are the two big ones atm. (I'm partial to Western Digital myself). As far as TB drives, there's really no reason not to buy one unless you're on a super-tight budget and you expect you'll never need that much space.

[Uraniun235]

hahaha i think general zod's been awhile since he went hard drive shopping


With the exception of laptop drives, and a couple of "green power" models from WD (and now Samsung), you generally won't find new 5400RPM drives any more - all the consumer drives these days are 7200 RPM.

- As far as performance goes - first of all, how important is it? I've always heard that hard drive performance is not terribly significant in the grand scheme of things, but still worth not overlooking. Secondly, what should I be looking for in a drive in terms of performance?

- What companies are worth looking at? Assume that I want a large-capacity drive, 500GB at least, and I'd like to hear reasons why I shouldn't buy a 1TB HDD(Worrying about space is a pain in the rear, and I'd like to get rid of it for a while), if any.

- Besides size and performance, what other criteria are worth looking at for the drive?

- Finally, for after I install it - how dangerous is it to just add it to my existing drives using Partition Magic or some such? I know it's reccomended to backup, but, realistically, what are the chances of a screw-up?

- Any 1TB drive you get - even the "greenpower" drives from WD - will handily outperform your 120GB hard drive. If you really want superior performance, you can look at a Western Digital Caviar Black or a Samsung Spinpoint F1, but really the Caviar Green should be more than adequate.

- 1 TB is close to the best bang for your buck you can get at the moment. Seagate's 1.5TB drives are actually even better positioned, achieving better than 10GB/$1 USD - however, there have been enough people burned by bad firmware from Seagate drives lately that I would hesitate to recommend them at this time.

- With the exception of abnormal events like Seagate's recent firmware snafu, other criteria can include:
Noise - some drives are quieter than others... some make more noise while seeking, others whine louder at idle.
Power consumption - if you're so inclined, as pointed out above there are options for those who want less power consumption at the price of slightly reduced performance.
Warranty term - how long does the warranty last?

- I'm not sure what you mean. Are you talking about creating one huge partition that spans both hard drives, or just adding it as a separate hard drive? The former I have no experience with, but the latter won't affect the data on your old drive.

[General Zod]

With the exception of laptop drives, and a couple of "green power" models from WD (and now Samsung), you generally won't find new 5400RPM drives any more - all the consumer drives these days are 7200 RPM.

That might be why. I've only really bothered looking at laptop or external hdds recently and not desktops.

[Uraniun235]

Addendum: I just browsed Newegg and they have a Hitachi 1 TB for only $88 USD, placing it at a competitive price point with the Seagate 1.5TB drive. I don't know what prices will be like where you live, but it's another drive to consider.

[Uraniun235]

Additionally, if you want the very most storage possible in a single drive, or if you want to show off to your friends, you could go pick up one of the recently-released 2 TB hard drives.

[Faqa]

- I'm not sure what you mean. Are you talking about creating one huge partition that spans both hard drives, or just adding it as a separate hard drive? The former I have no experience with, but the latter won't affect the data on your old drive.

The former option. I'd simply like to dedicate extra space to my current Windows installation, which is why I asked.

[Ace Pace]

- I'm not sure what you mean. Are you talking about creating one huge partition that spans both hard drives, or just adding it as a separate hard drive? The former I have no experience with, but the latter won't affect the data on your old drive.

The former option. I'd simply like to dedicate extra space to my current Windows installation, which is why I asked.

Uh what? I don't understand. You want to expand C:\ across multiple drives?

[Executor32]

If you want to add extra space, just copy the contents of your old drive to the new one with the utility included with the drive, then wipe the old drive. Voila, you have a metric fuckton more space for your Windows install, plus 120GB kicking around on a second drive. Why you'd want to do something weird like extend an existing partition across two drives is beyond me.

[Stark]

Or just mount the new drive as c:\games or c:\porn stash or whatever. Logically transparent but still separate and if the old drive dies who cares.

[Kitsune]

If you are willing to risk "White Label Drives", I just recently bought a pair of 500 gig SATA drives for $45 each at a place called 3BTech. SATA drives, per Gig, tend to be cheaper than IDE drives.

http://3btech.net/whlamadate50.html

It may not be the best choice for you but just wanted to offer it as a potential choice.

[Uraniun235]

Why would he want to risk white labels when he can get brand-name 1TB drives at similar per-gigabyte pricing?

- I'm not sure what you mean. Are you talking about creating one huge partition that spans both hard drives, or just adding it as a separate hard drive? The former I have no experience with, but the latter won't affect the data on your old drive.

The former option. I'd simply like to dedicate extra space to my current Windows installation, which is why I asked.

I think drive spanning can get messy if one of your drives shits its pants.

[Kitsune]

Why would he want to risk white labels when he can get brand-name 1TB drives at similar per-gigabyte pricing?

You have to compare a 500 Gig white label to a 500 Gig brand name...I had two machines which needed drives. White Label drives really are originally name brand drives just reflashed to no longer show the brand. As such, they should have the same reliability. In a perfect world, I would have preferred 1 TB drives as well.

Might honestly not be the best option for the OP but thought I would throw it out

[erik_t]

Buy two. Capacity is damned near free anymore. Seriously, I've spent more buying dinner on a bad date than it would cost for me to pick up a 500gb drive. RAID 1 is king; Data That You Don't Back Up Is Data That You Do Not Want. RAID 1 is not a proper off-site backup, but it's a pretty worthwhile investment if you care about what you put on your computer.

I mean, you're talking about 10-20 hours of minimum wage work equivalent. Would it take you more than 20 hours to replace every bit of content you have (including your own original documents, images, photographs, etc?). If it is, then buy another damned hard drive!