But... I'm on the fence about it. Say I have 280gb of data on it. I wake up one day and poof it got corrupt and is unreadable. Such a scenario has happened to me before, with some serious data loss. But, at a lower scale. That would like, totally SUCK?!??!?!? I haven't done any research on these drives... how are these new ones? Anybody have any stories, good/bad? thx

 

I have a couple 300gb seagates
one went out on me today but I have a couple other computers I scatter things around on so its all good.

i have my OS running on 60gb and use my other drives for storage.

 

A massive drive is not the answer. Two with daily redundancy backup is what you should do.

 

I have a 120gb, a 250gb and I just picked up a GRAID 500gb drive last week. NEver had any issues.

You have make sure you spend the money and get a good drive. Gtech/Graid are great.

 

no f'in way.... that sucks!!!!! ok forget it... I think I'm gonna get like a 160-200gb.

 

ok I'll consider that too... my main (Windows) drive on this machine is a 40gb.

 

Its because he bought those cheap seagates.

Dont buy seagate, maxtor, western digital...or any of those other cheap drives you find at best buy/compusa....not if you are looking at serious use an storage.

 

I think there are only five or six hard drive manufacturers in the world. You don't have much of a choice. Like computers, it's much more about the specific model you're buying and not the brand. But yes, the models you find on the retail shelves are often the bottom of the food chain. Sometimes though, they're decent.

 

While I don't like losing things I don't have anything that is unreplaceable on my giant drives

only thing I lost were some downloaded movies plus the fact it was external and in a non ventalated enclosure didnt help either.

 

Of the thousands of computers I have serviced over the years, I can count on one hand the number of Segate drives that have died. And seriously, I mean thousands of computers.

Here's a list, in descending order, of most replaced drives by manufacturer (from my experience):

1) Maxtor (before they bought Quantum)
2) IBM or Samsung
3) Fujitsu
4) Western Digital
5) Segate

All of my home machines and anything I build for friends/family/clients all use Seagate drives.

Regardless of what size disk you choose, always have a solid backup method. I don't need a ton of space, so I just run a RAID 1 array of 2 x 160GB disks (160GB total) and have an external drive for nightly backups and archiving. This way I can lose my backup drive and have one disk in the array fail and not lose data. I also burn DVD's of the really important stuff every now and then just in case of a catastrophic failure.

For the more casual home user, whatever drive you have in your computer, get an equal size backup drive. It can be an external kit or just another drive in your box, but don't use it for anything other than backing up your files. Most of the external kits on the market come with a backup software package for doing automated archives. Norton Ghost and IMC Retrospect get my recommendations for a reliable backup software solution and several kits now include one or the other.

 

For anyone planning on acquiring GHOST for home backups, double check the capabilities of the latest version. The last time I used the desktop version of GHOST, you could not save to a network drive, only locally attached media.

 

Dan...not talking internal drive, external...sometimes it also has to do with the enclosure more then the drive.

But I'd agree with order.

Go custom built or Gtech/Graid...you can go LaCie...but I have no love for them anymore.

 

so basically, I shouldnt buy the 200gb drive on sale for 29.99 at Office Depot?

 

Porn / MP3's / Videos are replacable, put it on the 300 GB drive.....

Personal pics, documents, etc should be burned to a DVD-RW once a week.

 

I bought this....


ST3500641A-RK 500GB 16MB
SEAGATE:
Outpost #: 4795159

* 7200RPM
* 16MB BUFFER
* RETAIL BOXED HARD DRIVE (INSTALLATION KIT INCLUDED)
* 5 YEAR WARRANTY
* REGULAR PRICE:$329.99


In stock, same day shipping
FreeShipping
Detailed Description | Tell a friend| Warranty Info
SEAGATE
larger view
Price: $ 189.99

 

I've been running a 400GB drive at home for about 6 months, and a 300GB drive at work for nearly 9 months, both seagate drives with no problems.

I've got a 500GB 3Gb/s drive waiting to be installed in my computer at home to replace my OS drive which is only a 1.5Gb/s 36GB Raptor. I can't wait to get rid of that slow sucker.

 

That's funny, the last review I read had the first-gen SATA 36gb Raptor pegged at exactly the same DriveMark score as the 500GB 7200.9 Segate.

 

Pretty similar according to StorageReview.com:

 

hmmm perhaps a clean install of XP would speed it up. Maybe I'll try that and use the 500 for a data drive.

 

Just found this...

http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q2...0/index.x?pg=1

 

if u want to make life less costly, buy a 400gb harddrive from www.tigerdirect.com, then partition it into a 100gb section and a 300gb section. then set it up so it does a weekly backup of the 300gbs onto the 100 gbs as a compressed file. This will solve many problems.

 

unless the whole drive fails. (which happens to me more often than just corrupt partitions)

Anymore i buy drives in pairs. Last I bought a 250 bg internal seagate drive and a external 250 gig acomdata super cheap usb drive.

From on the same computer I have another 120 gig hd, and my laptop has a 100 gig drive. Each of the drives has a folder with my pictures and documents on them, and they get updated weekly, while the two 250 gig drives back eachother up (picture file included).
it may be a bit anal, but short of a fire or flood I feel safe.

 

Rondog and I just picked up a 300gb samsung HD yesterday for 150 at comp usa. Maxtor also has a 16mb cache 300 gig hd for 169 at compusa. both hd's are sataII. And in case you are wondering, i work for a photographer and we have back up drives and a full data catolog in place. We have had at least one hard drive from every brand fail on us in the last 3 years.

 

That's like keeping two sets of dry clothes in a canoe. It's fine if one set gets wet, but if the canoe tips, you're fuxored.