Recommend me a hard drive.

[Joe]

So my Maxtor 120gig 7200 RPM hard drive just croaked on me, and I'm in search of a new drive. I'm still a fan of Maxtor, though I'm open to other suggestions at this point. I don't really need the full 120 gigs; I was barely breaking 30 after two years. Should I forgo on space to get a 10,000 RPM drive? I'd like to keep my price range this side of insane, so figure I won't go much higher than $80-100.

I'm going to be installing linux in addition to the NTFS music/games drive, so if there's something to take into consideration there, please make me aware of it.

Also, NEVER defrag an NTFS drive. Ever. Thanks.

[SurfD]

Also, NEVER defrag an NTFS drive. Ever. Thanks.

Just curious....Why?

Also, what kind of connection are you looking at? SATA? IDE?

[schild]

What the hell are you installing Linux for? Linux kills babies.

Edit: Oh and I recommend this.



You need this huge of a harddrive, Joe.

[stray]

What kind of hard drives? ATA or SATA? The only sub $100 10,000 RPM SATA's are 40 GB, made by WD. They aren't really worth it unless you run them in a raid. As for other drives, I guess I'll suggest Seagate. I've been buying them for years, Mac or PC, and they've never fucked up on me at least.

As for the Linux thing, don't use Fedora 2 as it has problems dual booting with XP. Fedora 3 and other distros don't have the problem. Also, things are always easier with Windows on the first disk or first slice.

For a games/music drive, you're better off using FAT32 imo. It's more reliable, and you'll be able to read and write to disk from Linux. Linux will only read NTFS (writing to NTFS works, but isn't recommended as of yet).

As for defragging NTFS, were you just using the built-in defragger? I've never heard about it causing disk failures before, but if you're paranoid about using it from now on, then get Perfect Disk. NTFS is much better off if you defrag every once in a while, and that's a much better way of doing it. You can pretty much run it for free if you want (30 day trial, but easy enough to work around, I guess).

[Trippy]

I prefer Maxtor drives myself -- they have the best combination of features in my book. Check out www.storagereview.com for reviews of various hard drives. www.newegg.com is selling the 36.7 GB Raptor for $105 so you could go that route if you are willing to put up with the extra noise and heat.

[SirBruce]

Well, I just bought a Maxtor Ultra 160GB not long ago, but that's a bit above your price range.  So you'd want to get the 80GB version.

7200rpm is fine and there's no need to get SATA unless your board supports it.  Since you are price-sensitive, the extra money for SATA probably isn't worth it for you.

Bruce

[grebo]

Super Friday at Best Buy of all places featured a 160GB 7200 WD for sub $30 after rebates and crap.

Best buy.  heh.

[SirBruce]

Yeah, I got mine for like $80 after rebate some time ago, but I didn't want to assume Joe would want to fill out a card or anything. :)

Bruce

[Joe]

I warn against defragging because it was the last thing I did before shit stopped working. I don't think it was the cause of everything dying, but I doubt spinning a shakey hard drive over and over while aggressively moving data did much to help.

I'm behind the times regarding data storage. What is SATA, and why is it better than ATA? As I said before, I don't have any real aversion to giving up space for speed/performance, especially since I'm going to be using it as a glorified console. I can also survive spending a bit more cash to ensure I get a quality drive with the specs I like. The $100 ceiling was more of a starting point.

Last night, I formatted the drive and partitioned a bit of it for windows and such, and tried to install debian on the remaining 40 gigs of space. I at least know where the bad sectors are now :p

[eldaec]

What is SATA, and why is it better than ATA? As I said before, I don't have any real aversion to giving up space for speed/performance, especially since I'm going to be using it as a glorified console. I can also survive spending a bit more cash to ensure I get a quality drive with the specs I like. The $100 ceiling was more of a starting point.

SATA is an alternative to ATA with, iirc, a higher bandwidth ceiling.

The important bit is that in the context of current drive speeds and motherboards in the earthly price spectrum, the performance advantage is marginal. But they are slightly easier to install, and the price difference isn't all that big on 7200 drives (varies from 0 to about 10% depending on manufacturer).

10000+ rpm drives, which might start to show a bigger performance advantage on SATA are rare, small, and expensive.

[OtherSide]

SATA connectors are easier to handle than ATA connectors since they're smaller.  As an added consequence, since the interface cables are narrower, they cause less air resistance so it's less likely your PC will melt-down from overheating.

Just make sure you get some sort of adapter for the power connection since, AFAIK, all SATA drives use a new-fangled connection, not the old 4-point Molex thingies.  (At least that was the case with my Seagates)

[Joe]

Upon looking at my motherboard (an Asus a7n8x), it would appear SATA support is sketchy and, uhh, not worth the trouble. So it's back to basic IDE 133, I guess. I think I'm going to go with Maxtor again, but this time I'll use FAT32 so linux can write to it with less trouble. I've pretty much turned my laptop into my main PC for everything but gaming, so I doubt FAT32 should cause any real problems for me. Thanks for the info.

If I'm missing something let me know.

[stray]

Upon looking at my motherboard (an Asus a7n8x), it would appear SATA support is sketchy and, uhh, not worth the trouble. So it's back to basic IDE 133, I guess. I think I'm going to go with Maxtor again, but this time I'll use FAT32 so linux can write to it with less trouble. I've pretty much turned my laptop into my main PC for everything but gaming, so I doubt FAT32 should cause any real problems for me. Thanks for the info.

If I'm missing something let me know.

I've got the same board and can run SATA fine. What exactly do you mean by sketchy?

EDIT: Nevermind, I have the a7n8x deluxe. So yeah, no SATA on the plain vanilla version. Are you sure yours isn't deluxe though? They ship with the same manual as the a7n8x, so you might want to check the board itself for SATA connectors.

[Joe]

What DOES the SATA connection look like? And I have the box from the motherboard, no delux :(

As an update, a co-worker friend of mine had a spare 60 gig WD laying around that may or may not work. Let us pray!

[Trippy]

What DOES the SATA connection look like? And I have the box from the motherboard, no delux :(

From www.techreport.com:

The SATA connectors in the above picture are those 4 black things sticking up around the blue IDE connector in the left hand side of the picture. They are basically very small connectors (hence the thin cable size) and unfortunately very easy to break.

[Joe]

Thanks. I'll have to check to see if I have those when I get home, but I'm not extremely optimistic. Thanks for all your help, guys.