Choosing A Hard Drive

[Elton]

How do I know which type of hard drive I need? I want to replace my slave, for back-up purposes.

 

The dead one is a Western Digital WD400. I've been looking at Dabs.com, but there are tons of different types.

 

I'd like one that plugs in, plays and is a bit bigger than the old 40gb, if poss.

[Ian FG]

Elton,

 

You need an Internal IDE drive, DABS are doing 80GB ones for about 35 quid.

 

You do not want SCSI or SATA drives

[Tog]

Any idea which flavor WD400 you have Elton?

Your motherboard may well support 'SATA' type drives which are now cheap enough to replace an old 'ATA' drive when it dies.

'SATA' is Serial 'ATA' & uses a small 4pin blade connector 'ATA100/133' etc is the older parallel interface with the big ribbon cables, Have a look at your motherboard to see if the SATA interface is fitted - if it's a 2004+ machine it should have a few SATA sockets.

I put a Samsung 80GB SATA one in my lads machine and it flys along (was £50 from PCworld last easter).

You can now get 160GB ones for £60.

Dabs don't seem to do many SATA drives?

So 'SATA' is a drive interface type as is 'ATA100/ATA133/PATA' which are all versions of the old parallel drive interface.

NB: You may need to be running XP to get the best out of large (+40GB) drives as W98 has a disk size limit and you need to use smoke and mirrors to run the larger ATA drives.

[zenith10]

get a seagate barracuda. but all the hard drives are good now a days

[chesters1]

i bought a cheap and cheerfull samsung 160gb 8MB cache 7200rpm and boy its quiet ,not a lot compared to the others despite its not so good reputation its been no bother (damn Grangers law is going to happen)

Granger Law to the unknowing (especially in my bailiff hat recomending swims)

: "Anything i say the opposite happens or nothing at all"

I.E i tell the head bailiff a cormerant appears at the pond every night at 5 pm (and has for weeks)he comes to look, grangers law steps in and its never seen again, or i advise swim 13 has been fishing best all week ,hey presto swim 13 blanks ALL other swims produce

 

[ 07. October 2005, 04:04 PM: Message edited by: chesters1 ]

[melpen]

You Have Mail.

[Elton]

melpen,

 

You're a star

 

Cheers,

 

Elton