I've just looked at a few sites and I am totally bewildered by the choice and the difference in price although they all look the same

My PC at home has a 40Gb HDD
Stunned that you can buy 300Gb jobs now (In my day )

Can you remember audio cassettes, there used to be a C-120 giving 2 hrs of play time. All good you think but they used to stretch and eventually snap because of the sheer volume of tape. A good example of biggest is not neccesarily best. Is the same true of Hard drives. i.e do 300Gb drives find it difficult to do basic tasks or do you have to forever tidy them up etc?
If 300Gb were soooo good, why doesn't everyone have one, especially given the tiny price gap between a 100Gb and 300Gb one

What is a cache when related to HDD's? Is an 8Mb cache better than a 2Mb one?

All opinions welcome, so all pile in

Mikey

 

8mb is better than 2mb

need 7200rpm for quicker access

If your pc supports ata133 then go for that or make do with ata100.

Recommend this one if you want a big un !

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=32012
Dave

[Edited by DemonDave - 30/07/2003 14:00:05]

 

Dave's spot on with recommendations. I'd go for something like an 80-120GB disk. Me and the bird are both happy with our Maxtor 80GB drives

 

Another big issue is NOISE... at least for me it is. Seagate Barracudas are quite quiet

 

Ermm i like to disagree with the recommendation of buying a hitachi / ibm seskstar drives - steer clear of them like the plague!
I have had 2 ibm drives that both died - 2 gig scsi died after just 2 years - ibm deskstar 40 gig literally 3 years 1 month- needless to say im not impressed with relaiabltity - I have an 8 gig fujitsu going strong after 5 years use and and my maxtor 40 gig still going strong after 4 years.
maxtor not the fastest drive but reliable - fujitsu had isues on some batches of hard disk but you should be ok with them - build quality of fujitsu generally better then maxtor but they are slighlty more expensive

 

as do Western Digital caviar drives

cheers

big sinky

 

Like the other comment here, I would avoid the IBM deskstar drives. At work our pc supplier used these drives for a short period, in just a few months every pc that had these drives needed a new one. One lasted just 3 days, I think they have a nickname of Deathstar.

I had a 3 year old 40gb maxtor fail at the weekend and have replaced it with a couple (yes 2) Samsung 120GB Spinrite drives. These are really quiet and with both running are quieter than the one maxtor drive.