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Anyone recommend a couple of decent yet not too expensive (bambino on teh way!) ones to stick in meh main machine as over the last couple of months I have blown the 2 that were in it, don't need anything huge for storage - have a second machine for that, basically 2 x 40gbs would be sufficient - anything bigger a bonus - only need windows installed and a handful of games and thats about it...

Can never remember if Seagate are better than Maxtor etc - I know one of the ones that just gave up on me was a Maxy....

Well, Seagate now own Maxtor and have done for a while. Seagate were the first company to release a proper SATA interface rather than bodging an old interface (PATA) to look like SATA. Pesonally I have only ever bought Seagate hard drives and never had any problem with them. But hard disks are like banks or supermarkets - everyone has their favourites and swear by them. The only really important thing is the warranty as you would be very hard pushed to notice the operational difference between similarly specced hard drives from different manufactures. Most hard drive manufacturers do a 3-year warranty. Have you checked yours Evzy? Go to the manufacturers website and find the warranty page and there will be somewhere to type in the unique serial number of your drive. It will then tell you if your drive(s) is still under warranty and if it is they will replace it free of charge, no quibbles. You send the old one back and they send you a new one of equal or better spec. That would be the cheapest option as they sometimes even give you a freepost address to return them by. Failing that look at price and see what you can afford.

My two hard drives are a 7200.9 series 80GB Seagate SATA for windows installs (got XP and Vista partitions) and software installs and a 7200.10 series 250GB Seagate SATA as backup, game install, DVD rips <cough> waiting for burning onto DVD-R etc. Both very quiet and very fast and use a full SATA II connection (check your BIOS doesn't use PATA compatibility mode but again you won't notice the difference, just me being tarty. Actually it is harder my way as you will most likely need to supply drivers on a floppy for the full SATA interface when you install XP just like you would for an unsupported RAID interface).

That was all making sense until you starting talking raid/drivers and floppies Didnt know Seagate now owned Maxy - coolio, will look at those drives etc - Cheers for teh advice - consider yourself repped

Think might order 2 of these Sata 80gb

Cant seem to find the ones you mentioned above, is there much use/difference/need to go from 8mb cache to 16mb? Most seem to be 8mb but some 16mb around I have noticed...

Western Digital all the way for me.

Running with 2 raptor drives just now but they're probably a bit on the pricy side if you're penny pinching.

Their other drives are still pretty good as well

As above: Seagate for good price/performance ratio, Western Digital if you want to squeeze out every bit of performance. I'd stay away from Hitachi in any case. And stop confusing Evzy with tech talk .

You would need very specific hardware setups to notice the difference between 8MB and 16MB caches on modern hard drives. For average usage the drives you mentioned Evzy are fine. Only synthetic benchmarks will show the differences between those drives and ones costing twice that price. Faster drives are generally also hotter and can of course be noisier. It's all swings and roundabouts really. Those really nippy Western Digital Raptors that Catalina mentioned are very good in RAID setups but I think a little overkill for what you would be using them for. Use the money you save to buy something nice for ther nursery.

I'm thinking about getting an external hard drive... something around the 500 gig range which attaches to firewire800 and then buying a firewire 800 card so i can use it and get great speeds.
This will enable me to put all my music/videos/crap on it and reformat my computer and then use the external harddrive basically as the main hard drive... will this be a lot slower than just buyin an internal hard drive?

You mean you want to reformat and install Windows on the external hard disk??? Why not just copy your "stuff" to external drive then wipe internal drive and reinstall Windows on the internal drive?

Unless you really need an external unit to carry around with you I would think you're better off with a new internal drive. Takes up no more desk space or plug sockets.

no i didn't mean installing windows on the external drive only on the internal drive... i just meant loading everythin from the external drive?

You would be better installing your programs on the main internal hard disk and using the external one for storing unreplacable stuff like images/music/documents etc. IMHO.

samsung spinpoints ftw tbh - quieter and more reliable than maxtor and western digital imo

The Western Digital Raptors are very nice (My last PC had the old "Raptor 74" in it and they are fast) however they are also very expensive (Around £130 I think).

My new PC uses the Segate Baracuda 750GB which I find to be a good little drive. It is still a 7200RPM drive so it's quite fast (Not as good as the WD Raptor) so as long as you have enough RAM to avoid exessive Page-File useage you should be fine.