Hard drives

[black roadster]

Nothing to do with difficult commutes. :P

Need advice from resident techies.

I need to upgrade the HDD for my desktop. Looking to spend no more than $80 out the door and would rather not deal with PITA mail in rebates. I want a good performing and reliable EIDE drive and the largest storage space I can get.

I've used Price Watch in the past with good results on finding PC hardware but I'm out of the loop now on what to look for. 7200RPM? 5400RPM? Brand? Firewire External? (Have a Firewire card already for my iPod)

This is the first step on eventually building a new box. It's currently a PIII 500Mhz with 384MB Ram. Plan on building a new box from scratch but can't right now. Need a larger HDD to hold me over. Master 20GB and Slave 40GB are nearly full. While I'm at it, I need a Black CD or DVD burner. I think a CD Burner is more in budget now though. My CDR drive went kaput. (Won't recognize any disks). Recommendations here too?

[channelmaniac]

As for hard drives you should look around for the specs... the faster the drive spins and the larger the data buffer is on the drive the better the performance of the drive.

If you find one with 5400 RPM and 8Mb buffer or one with 7200 RPM and a 16Mb buffer then go for the faster one with the bigger buffer. Even if you have to spend a few bucks for it. You'll be happier. Also check the transfer rates and get the fastest UDMA transfer rate. The larger the number the better.

Just be aware that ATA drives are a loose specification and you may end up with a drive that won't communicate with your 20 or 40Gb drive very well. So you may end up putting those on the secondary IDE bus to avoid issues.

As for the CDR drive... There are only a handful of manufacturers in the world. You can spend the $$$ on a name brand or go with a generic. I've done both and had both drives last just as long. Both models of drives will go south after burning a few hundred discs. Hell... The name brand drive I have here for CDR works great... I bought it to replace a generic that had a generic faceplate and a Phillips label on the back of the drive The generic DVD burner works just as well and at the time it was $70 at Fry's when all the name brands were running aroun $140.

Just watch out for SATA drives! Your old system won't have a controller for them and if you buy one of those drives you will not be able to use it until you buy a PCI based controller. Your new system will probably have SATA controllers on the motherboard unless you buy an older model motherboard. It's all the rage now.

If you want a hard drive you can move back & forth between a laptop and a desktop then a firewire drive will work wonders. I have a 60Gb 2.5" drive and it is LIGHTNING fast. I've copied 27Gb of data off a file server in less than 35 minutes. That was going from the server to my laptop over 100mb ethernet - crossover cable - and through the firewire connection on the lappy. It's way faster for sustained throughput than USB2.0. But, I'd stick with a fast ATA drive for a desktop if you don't want to share a drive between machines.

RJ

[bigDstars]

Go to Dell and find their "outrageous deals" section. Keep an eye on this section every couple of days. You can find great systems, sometimes even with 17" flat panel monitors for very cheap. You can get them with or without SATA drives. These systems are so cheap, and well built with the latest and greatest of everything, including the legal current OS that maintaining old junk is a waste of time and money. My opinion, YMMV....

[TurboDuane]

As for hard drives you should look around for the specs... the faster the drive spins and the larger the data buffer is on the drive the better the performance of the drive.

If you find one with 5400 RPM and 8Mb buffer or one with 7200 RPM and a 16Mb buffer then go for the faster one with the bigger buffer. Even if you have to spend a few bucks for it. You'll be happier. Also check the transfer rates and get the fastest UDMA transfer rate. The larger the number the better.

Just be aware that ATA drives are a loose specification and you may end up with a drive that won't communicate with your 20 or 40Gb drive very well. So you may end up putting those on the secondary IDE bus to avoid issues.

As for the CDR drive... There are only a handful of manufacturers in the world. You can spend the $$$ on a name brand or go with a generic. I've done both and had both drives last just as long. Both models of drives will go south after burning a few hundred discs. Hell... The name brand drive I have here for CDR works great... I bought it to replace a generic that had a generic faceplate and a Phillips label on the back of the drive The generic DVD burner works just as well and at the time it was $70 at Fry's when all the name brands were running aroun $140.

Just watch out for SATA drives! Your old system won't have a controller for them and if you buy one of those drives you will not be able to use it until you buy a PCI based controller. Your new system will probably have SATA controllers on the motherboard unless you buy an older model motherboard. It's all the rage now.

If you want a hard drive you can move back & forth between a laptop and a desktop then a firewire drive will work wonders. I have a 60Gb 2.5" drive and it is LIGHTNING fast. I've copied 27Gb of data off a file server in less than 35 minutes. That was going from the server to my laptop over 100mb ethernet - crossover cable - and through the firewire connection on the lappy. It's way faster for sustained throughput than USB2.0. But, I'd stick with a fast ATA drive for a desktop if you don't want to share a drive between machines.

RJ

Good advise. :)