I plan to buy a HDD next weekend, as I've pretty much filled-up my 120gb one.
I want to get a 200gb one, but I'm not sure if I should get a SATA one or not.(yes, my mobo has SATA)

Another thing, I've heard people mention "Raid" in relation to HDD's, but I've got no idea what it is. :S

So can anyone dish out some sound advice for me?

All Raid is for data protection... Say you have 5 disk, disk 1 is the one you access all the time and the other 4 are mirror images of the first... If the first one dies then the second drive kicks in and takes control.. Then you replace the first drive and it regains control.

Kind very simplified explanation.

As for the Sata it would depend on the brand you wanted

EDIT

Heres a better explanation from a website

Short for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks, a category of disk drives that employ two or more drives in combination for fault tolerance and performance. RAID disk drives are used frequently on servers but aren't generally necessary for personal computers.

I'm thinking of getting an external HDD for school, it would be so useful, you wouldn't have to burn CD's anymore!!!...But I keep on reading that the external HDD often fails on people and it kind of scares me. Sorry about hijacking the thread but are external HDD as reliable as internal ones?

I used an external Notebook harddrive for a year and never had problems with it... SoI would say they are just as reliable..

Ahh RAID. Too many home PC "afficionados" get their knickers in a knot over something that's employed purely for data integrity. The only reason you'd set your hard drives up in a RAID array, is if you wanted a constant source of data backup. While it's good to employ, it's just too expensive for the average home PC user, to set up, as the additional hard drive is mainly used to contanty mimic the first one, in case of hard drive failure. In short, if you want RAID, but also want another 200GB of storage space, you're going to need to buy a couple more drives...

As for SATA, if you've got it, go for it. SATA is faster, and "easier to configure" (negligable), plus the SATA cable is tiny. No more big ass ribbons taking up your case space.

Yeah, there was nothing worse than having rich PC geeks brag at school about how they had RAID set up on their home PC only to discover it was nothing more than just a source of backup. :P

I have a 250GB SATA DeskStar by Hitachi (8MB buffer and all)!

If you were to go any brand, i'd highly recommend Seagate.

The 250GB HD i just bought was a Seagate drive, with an 8MB buffer, SATA and with NCQ to boot. Only cost me $225.

Ah, I was alway under the impression that Raid was some sort of feature to destroy your harddrives in the event police came into your house and you had rather incriminating data that you wanted to get rid of quickly :D

RAID can also increase performace, there is more then one kind on RAID if those rich kids you metioned have any clue whatever it's prob set up to do just that.

Well on Saturday I picked up a 200gb SATA Seagate Barracuda for the low-low price of $165. :thumbsup:

I'm yet to install it though, as I'm not sure what I want to move over ot it yet; my media(music and videos) or my games.
I'm not sure which one would benefit from SATA more.

Running two 160GB WD SATA HDDs in RAID 0 :D

Only cost $254 as well :P

Also games will / should benefit from the SATA HDD unless of course your old HDD was PATA 100 / 133 in which case their is negligible peformance difference between the individual drives.

I'm not positive, but considering I only bought my PC in Feburary 04, I'd say that my old HDD is a 133.(it's 120gb btw)

If that's the case then I'll probably move my media to the SATA, as that tends to take up more room.

Some of you guys are forgetting about RAID 0. Actually RAID 0 offers no data backup at all (redundancy) so it should really be called AID.

Basically RAID 0 doubles the bandwidth of your HDs if you have 2 drives (triple if you have 3, etc). It does this by performing an interleaved read/write i.e. part of your data is written to one drive while the other part is written to the other.

I'm planning on a 2x 160GB RAID 0 in my next PC.

Now I've got a question. Which brand do people recommend? I've owned both Seagates and Western Digitals previously and neither have failed on me yet.

Brands to choose from now are Hitachi, Maxtor, Seagate and Western Digital. I've read that Hitachis perform the best but are the noisiest and Seagates are the quietest. Seagates also now support NCQ (Native Command Queuing) but only certain AMD and Intel boards support this. NCQ basically allows for more efficient transfer of data.

My Hitachi Deskstar is pretty silent, no noise at all. Or maybe its my PS2 fan thats drowning the hdd noise. :P

I recommend a DeskStar, love mine! ;)

I would have to sat Western Digital, using them at the moment. I have heard bad things about Maxtor, and whilst I know that Hitachi are the best performing, they also carry the DeathStar Moniker from IBM (they are essentially redesigned IBM HDDs in a sense, although they have fixed the problems).

Argh! My mobo isn't detecting my hdd!! :argh: Stupid SATA cables, I heard that they're sensitive and that sometimes they move around in the socket and that causes problems (detecting). Is this true?? :huh:

My 250GB HDD is now just sitting in there, useless peice of crap!!! :|

Why don't you open your PC, and have a look?

I've not yet had any problems with the connections on mine. they seem fairly secure.

Hello chaps, I might be getting my new PC next weekend, so what type or brand of HDD do you recommend? What should I look out for? Cheers. :thumbsup:

Its working now, I opened it up and fiddled around with the SATA cable, it was pretty loose. Works a treat now. :dance:

Does your new PC support SATA?

If so, then go for a SATA Seagate. You can't go wrong.

Also, i'm curious as to what your "new" PC is. Give us some specs yo!

Well I don't know if it'll support SATA or whatever just yet as I'll be buying the parts next w/end. It'll be a budget system, so don't expect me to buy anything fancy for it.
At the moment I'm looking at a P4 3.2ghz, 1GB RAM, Geforce 6600, MSI motherboard, dvd burner and some sort of HDD. It'll be a step up from my current Celeron 633mhz with 4Mb of video ram and 8GB HDD. :P

You call it a budget system, yet it's got alot more on it than my $1k system I got in January 04. :P

I can't remember, but I think the mobo you were looking at supported SATA.(most do nowadays)

EDIT: Yes it does. :)
http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/mai...ail.php?UID=623

Though it only has DDR 400 and an APG slot, but if you plan on replacing you PC in the future, instead of upgrading, then don't worry. ;)

Well it's a budget system when compared to everyone elses gaming rigs they have now. Didn't your video card cost over 1G, Manny?

Yes, yes it did.

Now let's never speak of that again.

:lol:!

Civ, will you be building the computer yourself? Some things you should look out for are compatibility between your motherboard & processor (they need to be the same socket type), whether your video card is AGP or PCI Express, etc.. And for god sake don't buy at Harvey Norman. :P

He knows not to buy from anywhere that isn't a small computer store, I've told him that on MSN numous times! :P

I remember correctly, one of his PC savvy friends will be building it for him, so I don't think compatiblity is an issue.

My only concern is if he wants to upgrade later on, as some of the specs on his motherboard(no PCI-E and no DDR2) will be phased out in the next year or two, which will make it harder for him to upgrade.

PCI-E still hasn't eventuated to anything, so I wouldn't worry about that. They'll still be making PCI devices for a few years to come.

I built my own PC, I feel special...

Does anyone know if its possible to push one's videocard to the max just in the BIOS? My FX5700LE is so dated. I can't even have X2 anti aliasing on Doom 3 or the framerate chokes bad! (Pretty off topic huh? :P )

Um, my HDD is making strange vibrating noise. ;)

Yeah, I know someone who builds PCs so I won't be buying any pre-packaged crap from Harvey. ;) Basically we're going to a PC warehouse and pick the parts ourselves, head back and start building it. I better not forget to get all those neons I'm putting in it. :P

Estapol, keep your phone on all saturday as I'll SMS you about parts. ;)

I build my own PCs too :thumbsup:

That's not your Deskstar is it?

Well after doing some calculations I figured out that a 250GB HD gives you the best value in terms of $/GB. So I'm going with a 2x 250GB RAID 0

Some may think it's overkill but I reckon it will come in handy if I ever need to do some digital video editing. Plus it's handy if you are lazy and can't get around to burning off all those linux distros you've been downloading from the internet :P

Plus I just want to be able to say I have half a terabyte of storage :lol:

I wouldn't even bother trying to push anything out of the card, since it ain't a good card in the first place. But if you did want to try something you could try bumping the Mem Speed / Core Speed Up on it, although your warranty will void.

So I would reccomend you get that P.O.S out of your computer and get a new graphics card :)

Also is your HDD mounted properly?