Hard Drive

Gurrg · Posted: Fri May 16, 2003 8:09 pm Post subject: Hard Drive

I am looking for some Hard Drive so can i have the basics for buying new hard drive, i would want about a 40 gig hard drive, what are the diff. kinds? Will they all work for gateway comps?
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John Doe · Posted: Fri May 16, 2003 10:07 pm Post subject:

Hmmm, ok lets do hard drives 101.

Your Gateway more than likely uses a IDE hard drive (also called EIDE) and should accept pretty much any drive out there that you purchase. I am assuming that the Gateway is no more than a few years old though. There is a remote chance that its SCSI but thats pretty unlikely for a home based PC.

There are a couple of factors that will determine how fast your drive is, first is the speed. Mostly you will see 7200 or 5400 rpm drives, get the 7200 as its much faster and will perform better.

Next is the buffer in the drive, more is better. Some drives have 8 megs of cache on them, others have 2. Again more is better.

Pretty much any Drive has a Ultra ATA-100 or 133 interface, older PCs may not support faster than Ultra-66 but drives are backwards compatible so dont let this worry you when selecting a drive.

The big three drive makers are Seagate, Western Digital and Maxtor. Capacity and features are what determines the price. Bigger isnt always better, but faster is usually better.

Another big factor that I should mention is warranty. Last year the big three reduced their standard warranty from 3 years to 1 year. Western Digital has 3 year warranties on their higher class drives (8 mb buffer, 7200 rpm modesl) and I understand Maxtor is following suit with their better drives. I dont know what Seagate is doing but I expect they will do similar things to keep up with the Joneses. The Warranty is very important IMHO, I have seen too many drives failing lately and if they are not on warranty your SOL and need to purchase a new one, if its on warranty you can get it replaced by the manufacturer fairly quickly via their website.

whew! Ok, I covered alot but not in much depth. Hope it answers some questions but if you have more please post and I am sure someone will be so good as to reply if I miss the post.

JD
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Gurrg · Posted: Sat May 17, 2003 7:57 pm Post subject:

Thanks JD that helps a lot, one more question. Now if i get this new one, i'm looking at a Maxtor 40 gb,7200 1 yr warranty, and when i get it, would i have to wipe everything out and the ninstall it so i wouldn't lose anything, or how does that work?
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Twisted29 · Posted: Sat May 17, 2003 8:32 pm Post subject:

If you have any generous friends who can ghost your current drive, thats the way to go. That is of course, unless you want to clean out all the random junk on your drive. Then, just go the reinstallation route.
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shockwave · Posted: Sun May 18, 2003 12:12 am Post subject:

For looking for a harddrive prices try www.shopper.com or www.pricewatch.com. They help one find good deals.
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John Doe · Posted: Sun May 18, 2003 8:07 pm Post subject:

I always prefer a reinstall to be honest. Ghost or Drive Image can make for a easy migration though.

Another option that I dont know much about is the XP config and settings migration tool or at least that is what I think its called.

But IMHO your always better off reinstalling.

JD
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GameOverMan · Posted: Fri Jul 25, 2003 5:56 am Post subject:

hey i might not no much about this but on some computers u can have 2 hard drives: the nwouldnt it be possible to just copy all ur information from one to the other? that seems like the way to go

Clay Pigeon · Posted: Fri Jul 25, 2003 2:52 pm Post subject:

Western digital special edition (8 meg cache) hard drives come with tools that enable ghosting and formatting high capacity drives on computers with operating systems that would be unable to do so. I am very happy with my WD1200JB, and I am glad that it has a three year warranty.

JtH · Posted: Fri Jul 25, 2003 3:03 pm Post subject:

yeah i have two hard drives on mine and thats what i do when i need to reinstall windows or such. i just copy all of the stuff i want onto the other drive, do what i need to do, then copy it back.

jack
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FragFailure · Posted: Fri Jul 25, 2003 3:27 pm Post subject:

I have three hard drives and one rom drive. Besides updating my motherboard, processor, and memory. I'm looking at the Western Digital 120 gb, 7200 rpm, 8 mb cache Special Edition hard drive. It's about $175 in stores in Vegas (Best Buy, Fry's, and Comp USA.) At newegg.com I saw it for $115 as of two weeks ago. I think I'll buy online and wait the three days and get the free shipping as well.

I've totally lost track with what motherboards work with what processors though. I'm gonna probably go with an intel one since they seem easier to configure with the motherboards.
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