New hard drive time

[glojo]

My hard drive has started to make 'noises' and before those noises prove terminal I plan on replacing it\them.

Do we recommend two medium sized (500Gb) or perhaps one large one?

What brand do the experts recommend and perhaps what size?

The computer has SATA II capabilities and I prefer quality over quantity

Regards
John

 

[wemorgan]

PCPro currently recommend the Samsung SpinPoint

 

[Alfie]

My hard drive has started to make 'noises' and before those noises prove terminal I plan on replacing it\them.

Do we recommend two medium sized (500Gb) or perhaps one large one?

What brand do the experts recommend and perhaps what size?

The computer has SATA II capabilities and I prefer quality over quantity

Regards
John

Stick with a big name like IBM, Seagate, western digital, Maxtor etc.

Better a slightly smaller good name brand than a whopping big lesser known one

 

[hitenhirani]

samsung make a lot of OEM drives. meaning a lot of the PC manufacturers use Samsung drives in their standard builds. take it as you will...
they are either used, because they're cheap, or because they provide good value for money, will last a fair while.
Personally though, I'd go Seagate or Western Digital.

do you have a RAID Controller on the motherboard?
if so, you may want to think about RAID options, fault tolerance (mirror) or performance (span). or both if you can afford it!

 

[grober]

My preference is for Western digital products but to be honest there's not much in it. One thing to look out for is the normal operating noise figure if you want a quiet life. http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/hard-drives,3.html

 

[hitenhirani]

check for RPM's for disk access speeds too.
higher rpms usually mean quicker access times.

check for Cache/Buffer memory, try and get a 16Mb cache/buffer. you will notice the difference straight away!

on the back of an earlier post, if you do go RAID option, make sure the disks are identical.

 

[glojo]

The computer case is alongside my bed and right by my head Literally 60cm away from my lug-holes, so noise is a major factor.

By pure coincidence I have been off line and have just read a review regarding the SpinPoint:

The Samsung SpinPoint P120 was fast when it worked, it came in a Dell XPS. Has been loud from the start. Crashed and burned after 18 months with (in my opinion) only light to medium use. Replacing with a WD. I've learned the hard way to backup data. Dont recommend this hard drive unfortunately.

I am extremely lucky to belong to this forum as it has experts in most fields but IT seems to be the most popular occupation, so please feel feel to throw in any and all suggestions.

Yes I am told my computer does have RAID and me being a 'Snapper' with my camera I need to have reliability, so RAID sounds a good idea.

Do we recommend two 500 Gb drives as opposed to a single Tb?

reagrds
John

 

[hitenhirani]

ok, Raid can provide one or the other or both, but it costs more to have both! if you want fault tolerance, i.e. one drive physically fails, then the data will be on the other drive. if you catch a virus, you're more than likley screwed, as the virus will be writen to both discs.

I'd get 2x 500Gb drives, and RAID 1 config,
so you have the same data being written to both discs. only one disk is "active" at any one time, if one fails, you just fail it over, make the other one "active" and replace the drive, and rebuild the array.
again, not much difference, and will become a preference, but Seagate or WD are both good makes. read some more reviews!

 

[Sp!ke]

I would be wary of buying Deathstars. (IBM dont make disks anymore)

I would consider mirroring your drives and having a separate tape or NAS backup on top of that.

Disks fail.... lots

 

[Dryce]

Stick with a big name like IBM, Seagate, western digital, Maxtor etc.

Better a slightly smaller good name brand than a whopping big lesser known one

It's a bit difficult to find lesser known brands with drives.

Samsung *is* a major brand.

IBM sold their drive business to Hitachi.

 

[GrahamC230K]

I'm not convinved about the use of RAID for personal circumstances like this, even if you are a heavy user. Mostly because of the reasons above.

If you use RAID to mirror, you mirror everything, the good and the bad and you still need backups in case of file deltetion, overwriting or corruption. If you use RAID as a resilience, all you gain is lack of down time in the event of a failure. For the cost, most home user can handle a little down time, so long as you are sure you have everything backed up. Money no problem, mirror, but remember backups.

My recommendation would be to firstly make sure you know where your data is. Not just My Documents, your favourites, everything. Make sure this data is backed up.

If you can keep your data on a seperate drive (although make sure all your data is there), it makes it easy to maintain a fairly contemporary image of your system drive only (which will be relatively small) for a very quick system restore to the point you just need to restore your data if that has been affected.

 

[Dryce]

Yes I am told my computer does have RAID and me being a 'Snapper' with my camera I need to have reliability, so RAID sounds a good idea.

Do we recommend two 500 Gb drives as opposed to a single Tb?

There is RAID and there is RAID.

Ideally for simplicity what you want is hardware RAID with dual drives and mirroring (RAID 1 or RAID 1+0) and a controller which will automatically handle a drive failure and rebuild the RAID setup of a replacement drive. Many systems come with alleged RAID on the motherboard but with precious little support or documentation.

As said elsewhere look at NAS. Gigabit network interface + a NAS storage device is a very easy way to deal with backup.

 

[Dryce]

I'm not convinved about the use of RAID for personal circumstances like this, even if you are a heavy user. Mostly because of the reasons above.

The advantage of RAID is that if you have a disk failure you don't have to do a restore.

Backup under Windows (all variants including Server) sucks big time. Restores from scratch can be hugely painful.

The advantage of hardware RAID is that the OS doesn't even realise the disk is goosed.

You still have to make off-system backups to protect against other types of failure and explicitly archive important materials.

 

[BTB 500]

I would personally go for an external drive for backup, kept in a different location to the PC. RAID etc. is all well and good until someone nicks your PC or (God forbid) you have a fire in that room. Then you've lost everything.

 

[stevesey]

Ditto to Bill's comments. I have a 24/7 server with big drives as the backup machine. Individual PC's have 2 drives each & both drives have identical operating system/program files partitions at the start and one is cloned from the other every months or so. Data is split between the rest of the two drives. If I loose a drive I can be back to a booting OS in minutes and have all the data backed up on the server.

 

[glojo]

The deed is done and overkill has been the name of the game

Two 1Tb Spinpoints which will be configured in RAID.

I take onboard everything tnat has been said, and Sp!ke's remark made me smile as that is exactly the words my son used 'Death Star!' He advised I went for the Western Digital's but a compromise was reached.

The computer will not get stolen (famous last words) and if it catches fire then you will finally be rid of me as it sits just 60cm from my head so if it burns, then we will not have to worry about my funeral arrangements

Thanks again everyone for ALL the excellent constructive advice

Yours sincerely
John the hard up

 

[Dragon]

They are all made in China and the same supplier no matter what the brand names. Don't spend too much, say £50 from PC World. Tesco also quite reasonable.


Better still buy a new PC/laptop, it will come out cheaper. £250 for a Dell desktop or £350 for a laptop also from Tesco/Tesco Direct.

 

[Sp!ke]

They are all made in China and the same supplier no matter what the brand names.

Speaking as someone who works for one of the above mentioned companies, I can say with authority that you are talking utter tosh.

Why do you insist on continually posting rubbish?

 

[whizzkid11]

Maxtor, Seagate and Hitachi are mostly what I use.

WD have had issues with as with Noisy Fujitsus and mediocre Samsungs.

- Drop Mercmanuk a mail - he usually has some good deals...

 

[normanr]

Speaking as someone who works for one of the above mentioned companies, I can say with authority that you are talking utter tosh.

Why do you insist on continually posting rubbish?

He is also doing exactly the same on another forum (Televisions) all the time he is allowed to say things he obviously knows nothing about and steers members in the wrong direction and also upsets new members with his sarcastic remarks (Gina ) and Pammy there is not much we can do about it but ignore him and hope he goes away.