upgrade hard drive

[BDBohnzie]

I 2nd Western Digital HDDs. I have 2 drives in my machine now (8.4gb, 40gb), and have never had any problems with them. I built my current machine about 3 years ago, and it's still running like a charm (AP Athlon XP 2400+, 1 GB DDR (recently upgraded from 512), 40 GB Master, 8.4 GB Slave (HD from old machine), ATI Radeon 9600XT Video Card). All the pieces together probably ran me about $600 (includes recent upgrades of memory, video card and DVD burner).

but slapping in a HD is pretty easy. just stay grounded and you'll be good to go.

[MTK]

Ok so once I get the new HD in what happens from there? I keep reading online about people complaining about having to partition the drive.

[TheMalcolmConnection]

Originally Posted by Mattyk72

Ok so once I get the new HD in what happens from there? I keep reading online about people complaining about having to partition the drive.

If you use the Ghost that I sent you, you won't have to worry about doing crap. Ghost sees the two drives just as physical space. No partitions needed. What you'll do is say, "Disk to disk" when you boot into Ghost, then pick the "Source" drive, this will be your old drive and by default the other drive will be selected. Just press go and it'll take a few minutes and you can just pull the old drive and be good to go.

[TheMalcolmConnection]

Also, if you're going laptop, Samsung is the way to go.

[FRPLG]

I have seen probably a 45-50% fail rate on WDs that we have in most of our 2-3 year old Dells. We wondered if it was an issue involving the Dell/WD combo but starting seeing the same issues in custom builts. There is a reason that WD thrives in the cheap refurbish market. Because they have plenty of devices to fix and resell.

[That Guy]

woah, raid 0 = half mean time till failure. it's awesome till it breaks and you lose everything. if you're going that route, i'd really suggest hardware raid 5 for some kind of safety net... unless you keep good backups, which almost no one does.

and yeah, ghost is truly amazing



the best hard drive deals are ALWAYS rebates at compusa/staples/best buy etc, when available. otherwise, you can get a 300gb for 90$ (newegg.com) non-rebate (which is the best price/size right now). once you have the space, you'll figure out how to use it . seagate is a little slower, but they use less moving parts and fail less often. hitachi and samsung have low fail rates too.

[GhettoDogAllStars]

You might consider something along these lines:

[drew54]

I have seen hard drives of all makes fail.

I have just recently had to work on Seagate, WD, Maxtor.

I know Seagate owns Maxtor now, but back in the day they were junk. If you ever need a good data recovery program check out Spinrite from GRC.com. I have used that on three dead hard drives now, and it saved two of them. If the drive will not show up in Bios then you are screwed.

[GhettoDogAllStars]

Originally Posted by drew54

I have seen hard drives of all makes fail.

I have just recently had to work on Seagate, WD, Maxtor.

I know Seagate owns Maxtor now, but back in the day they were junk. If you ever need a good data recovery program check out Spinrite from GRC.com. I have used that on three dead hard drives now, and it saved two of them. If the drive will not show up in Bios then you are screwed.

I agree. Spinrite is great. That guy also makes some other useful stuff too.

[MTK]

Not sure if this is potentially an issue but I only have one drive bay. Is it possible to hook up two drives in order to ghost my info?

[TheMalcolmConnection]

There are some enclosures that will let you retrofit drives in your optical bays.

[MTK]

I also have an external drive, can I ghost the drive to there and then transfer it from there to the new internal drive?

[TheMalcolmConnection]

Yeah, ghost it as "Disk to Image" though if you're going to your external.