Recommend me a new (cheap & reliable) HDD

[lostkat]

My HDD corrupted last night and won't boot anymore. I'm really hoping that all my photographs are still on it :undecided:

Can anyone recommend a reasonably priced 100+ gig HDD which has a decent reputation wrt reliability.

My last two were Seagate Barracudas and they both corrupted. Probably my fault for not religiously re-formatting every 6+ months.

[Davey_Pitch]

I've had Western Digital drives for a few years now and they've never given me any trouble, even if I don't reformat for months on end (probably not done it in 2 years or so). Assuming you want IDE there's several you could pick from here - http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/search/?strSearch=&bolShowAll=true&intStoreID=2&intCatID=4&intSubcatUID=379&intMfrID=15&bolShowAll=true

[Admiral Huddy]

You can't go wrong with the Samsung Spinpoint P120 (250GB) @ £36 from scan

or the Hitachi Deskstar T7K250..

Both good hdds.

[Feek]

My last two were Seagate Barracudas and they both corrupted. Probably my fault for not religiously re-formatting every 6+ months.

Slightly OT but that's rubbish, you should be able to run drives for years and years and years without having any data corruption problems and without having to regularly reformat.

[Admiral Huddy]

I've had three drives go in four years :( I lost my pics of my holiday last year.. I should have known better.. but the backup software became corrupt as well.

[semi-pro waster]

I would have suggested Seagates normally but I could understand if you weren't keen to buy another one so then my suggestion would be WD as Davey suggests.

You shouldn't need to reformat a drive, it has no impact on whether it is likely to corrupt as far as I am aware.

Good luck getting your photographs back, a program such as Get Data Back has a reasonably good reputation for that sort of thing but if it is a total failure it might not do anything much. :)

[Daz]

Samsung have never given me any trouble :) Think Huddy's onto a bargain there.

Get the drive to me Kate, I'll tell you if anything's recoverable. Sata or Pata?

[Davey_Pitch]

You shouldn't need to reformat a drive, it has no impact on whether it is likely to corrupt as far as I am aware.

Indeed, though I've known a low level format to fix bad sectors in the past which have caused a PC to become unbootable.

That actually gives me an idea. Kate, you could try something called the Ultimate Boot CD, which I can send you if you need it. It has a lot of HDD utils on it which can fix bad sectors and fix drives. Obviously if it's majorly FUBAR nothing much will help that, but I've sorted out two laptops in work with it, so it's worth a try :)

[lostkat]

Thanks for the advice guys, will have a look at the WD ones as well as Samsung as I've heard good things about them in the past.

On a positive note, the PC now boots. I booted with the Windows Disc and ran recovery on it. However, it's still a bit unstable and has thrown up several errors and rebooted itself randomly a few times, so I'm going to get a new HDD as soon as I can afford one. Then I can use this one as a slave and sort out all my important files (i.e. photos) so they're easily backed up onto DVD.

The exact same thing happened with my other Seagate HDD, but that was coupled with a new mobo, so it obviously didn't like it anymore. All I did with this one was try to plug in the floppy drive and it just decided that it wasn't playing anymore. Bloody thing!!!!

One more question... when I get the new HDD, I know that accessing this one will be a pain in the ass because it comes up with some blurb about authorisation (it happened last time). Can I stop this by just removing the administrator password??

Thanks again for all your help/advice. So glad that it's not as bad as I first feared.

[Daz]

You'll just need to take ownership of the files again, not a big job, but quite disk intense, and if it's failing already I wouldn't like to strain it :/

I have a spare 30GB external drive (small, USB powered) you're welcome to borrow if you'd like to get your photos off now? If that's not enough, you could use the big 500GB one, though I'd need to clear some stuff off first :)

[jmc41]

I've seen Knoppix a CD bootable linux distro work quite well for getting stuff off a drive that's been messed up.

It's 700mb but you can get decent and legal torrents for it that download pretty quick.

It's a bit more pricey but you could use raid1 in future to mirror the data and avoid loss unless both drives die at the same time. It certainly worked well at work, no downtime with tape restores at all.

Scan is doing 160gb maxtors for £30/each inc. vat.

Quite tempted myself actually.

[Will]

WD are good drives. Anything except Maxtors I've had good experience with really. Then again they are mechanical and will fail in time unfortunately.

Get yourself an external drive to keep all your photos on - it's at least a bit safer and not on the same partition as your system drive - I always keep data & system separate. :)

[Daz]

Doesn't matter what partition they're on if it's the same disk :p

Also, RAID is NOT a backup solution - It's an availability solution. If you're bothered about looking after your important data, yes invest in a second drive, but keep it outside the system, and get into a good backup routine.

[Will]

That's what I meant sarcy **** :p

[Daz]

omg newb!

[Will]

Bloody l33t geek! :p

[Dr. Z]

All I did with this one was try to plug in the floppy drive and it just decided that it wasn't playing anymore. Bloody thing!!!!

Sounds to me like your power supply might not be all that? Similar things have happened to me and inevitably the problem was traced back to a crap PSU. Happened so many times that I dont bother with anything but PSU brands that I know and trust :)

[Tak]

Semi related news stuff (http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6677235.stm)

[lostkat]

Right, I managed to recover my Hard Drive, but it's now full to the brim. I keep getting warnings.

Is this (http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=0&action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X3Jldmlld3M=&product_uid=129413%3Cbr%20/%3E) a good deal?

I know there are cheaper, smaller ones around but I'll just fill them up with my photos/music. I was planning to use this as a storage device, then run windows off my existing (reformatted) hard drive.

[Stan_Lite]

Seems like a reasonable deal - a couple of quid cheaper than most places.

I used to swear by Western Digital drives but the last one I bought went tits up after a couple of weeks so I don't sing their praises as much as I used to. I wouldn't let it put me off buying another one though, as they tend to be good drives.

I've done the same with a couple of machines in the past - used the smaller original disk as a system disk and a new, bigger, drive for storage.

[Mark]

The link you posted has an extra newline at the end. :)

Anyway, I had a WD drive 'go tits up' after a few weeks too, but then I had about six others that still work.

As for the deal, seems sound to me. Most places quote £61+ ex. VAT for that drive.

[leowyatt]

All these prices include delivery.

160gig - around £36
200 - around £40
250 - around £42
500 - around £72

EDIT: turns out it's the same drives just cheaper from EBuyer :embarassed:

[mejinks]

I read a review on in Computer Shopper about Samsung Hard drives not only being very reliable, but being quicker than the rest at writing and reading.

Personally I stay away from anything that says Fujitsu and Hitachi. I was at 118UK when the infamous Fujitsu hard drive failures happened. In total I had to rebuild 580 machines each having to have customisations so I wasn't best pleased.

[Mark]

True. Samsung are quality drives, but you often pay a premium for that.