f13.net

I hhave used this hard drive pretty well.  It's a seagate st316021a.  Windows would take a long time to load.   Sound would skip or pop or just sound staticay while the drive was accessing things.  Programs would load up very slow.   The first one I had crashed after a bit but it was under warrenty and I had the drive RMAd.  Now about a year and half later, the replacement is acting the same way the old hard drive did before it died.  I cannot have a crash right now (midterms/papers)

My question to you is:  What brand should I try next?  Should I attempt to clone the old drive to the new one?

I've had an old IBM 40GB hard drive since the late 90s. (IBM Deskstar type). Then again, I had another one (same series, 60GB) crash after a mere 9 months of hardcore operation. Currently using an IBM 120GB SATA drive, no issues whatsoever.

They're costly as fuck though. I've heard good things about Western Digital. Maxtors seem to be based on luck person-by-person; I had a college roomie who swore by Maxtor, but had his RAID array crash every few months, losing all his important work (and pr0n).

If you can do it sooner rather than later, attempting to clone the drive yourself probably isn't too risky. If you're using NTFS, you can use the linux program ntfsclone (included on the Gentoo 2005.1 boot CD) to do the dumpage; FAT32, you can mount it straight up and just copy stuff over.

If you're not unix-savvy, there's commercial drive imaging programs such as Ghost that should be able to do the job for you.

Being a student, I somehow doubt you're willing to shell out the bucks for a serious drive recovery service though, so if you intend to save your stuff, I recommend a replacement ASAP.

First thing to do is backup your important data ASAP.

If reliability is your top concern I'd get another Seagate, actually. They have the best reputation and warranty on consumer drives. I would not try to clone the old drive to a new one -- it's better for the health of your OS to reinstall from scratch. You may have spyware/viruses/StarForce and other crap screwing up your computer right now especially if you are in a campus dorm setting.

If this is actually a hardware problem with the drive you may have other issues with your computer (having two drives with problems within a year and half is not typical). The last drive I had go bad on me almost certainly did because of overheating issues. It was sandwiched between two other drives with no appreciable gap between them. S.M.A.R.T. monitoring tools would report that that drive was operating above max operating temperature even though I had a fan blowing across the drives (the other two were still with normal ranges) and sure enough eventually the drive picked up enough bad sectors to cause problems with the FAT.

So you should check to make sure that your hard drive isn't running too hot. You can get a S.M.A.R.T. temperature montoring program from here (http://www.panterasoft.com). Even if it's running within a safe range you still may want to mount a fan in front if there isn't one there already (and make sure it's blowing in the right direction). Assuming temperature isn't an issue the next thing to check is your power supply. Is it high quality one? If not you might want to replace it with one. If it's a high quality power supply the final thing is to consider is getting a UPS with "AVR" (Automatic Voltage Regulator). If your area is prone to brown outs and power dips a typical UPS may not kick in which can cause problems depending on how good your power supply is. With AVR the UPS is feeding a consistent amount of voltage to your power supply no matter if your power from the wall sockets dips or surges.

Get 2 SATA Raptors and RAID them. My OS boots in 2 seconds, I'm never going back.

I love my fluid bearing Samsung. I can barely even hear it.

Yeah, this is what I have.  That being said, I'm getting the feeling he's a student - and another point is if a raid drive fails it can get even trickier....

Just for reference, I swear by Western Digital drives. I've always used them. One of the drives in my machine has got to be almost 4 years old now.

I've never had a problem with WD drives, or heard of anyone having trouble.

I  had some WD drives go bad, although it was during a period where the sizes got so big so fast that all the companies' drives were dying within a year.

I am a student.
Cloned everything to my new WD drive and everything is aok.
Just in time for me to commit seppiku before finals.

Dude, be a winner like me, and do your Senior Seminar thesis paper in 16 straight hours.

It'll put hair on your chest.