Hard Drive upgrade for the Dell?

Live forum: http://forum.freeipodguide.com/viewtopic.php?t=9443

CollidgeGraduit

23-03-2005 04:08:17

Hey guys,

I don't have total faith in my ability to pick out components, so I just wanted to get your opinion. What are some good hard drives, from NewEgg, that will work with my Dell 4700 from FDPC?

Thanks!

CoMpFrEaK

23-03-2005 10:43:07

I haven't looked into what type of hard drives the dell uses but heres the basic hard drive industry break down

SATA (serial ata)
SCSI (for servers)
ATA (old interface but most popular)


Yours is probably ata or sata

Brand wise the most popular are (in order of my preference)

1. Seagate
2. Hitachi (dont give me the 60gxp/75gxp crap, that was years old under ibm)
3. Samsung
4. Maxtor (16mb buffer!!)
5. Western Digital

Seagate is known as one of the quietest hard drives and one of the most reliable (only one to offer 5 year warranty), hitachi got very well known with the 7k250 hard drives that were the fastest. Samsung is reliable while quiet but not cheap (probably cuase of the low amounts of production), maxtor came out with a 16mb buffer so its regaurded quite highly though since you probably dont have the 915 chipset you cant really take advantage of its special features, and western digital i dont like them just cuase i had bad experiences but they are ok overal, average hard drives with a 1 year warranty (lowest around)

Prices! Newegg offers some nice prices, but if your willing to do rebates you an get better prices

SATA around 50 cents to $1 a GB
ATA around 20 cents to 50 cents a GB

Look at the hot deal section of

www.fatwallet.com
www.anandtech.com

and you can find some good deals, frys electronics usully has seagate hard drives for cheap after rebate, just keep documentations of all your rebate submissions and you should be good. (warning frys rebates take aronud 1/2 year give or take a few months)

Tholek

23-03-2005 10:54:38

I thought Maxtor had the highest failure rate among the brands you mentioned?

Sadly, I've had a WD HD go bad, so I'm now with you on them. (Used to love them)

vulcan300

23-03-2005 10:58:32

generally, people are iffy on preferences for hds. I would just do what compfreak noted, cruise fatwallet or slickdeals and wait for some HDs that are decently cheap. I mean if you see a wd 200gb for 80, i mean why not?

Tholek

23-03-2005 13:07:41

Unless you have a RAID config, backing up a 200 gigger is a painful process, and while all brands have failures, to go with a brand that has a higher rate is a bad move.

Me, I didn't quite follow that advice, and went for a Black Friday sale @ BestBuy. (WD1600's @ $30 or so)

If I see a sale on Seagates @ 160GB+ as good, I'd buy, but I doubt I will. (

CoMpFrEaK

23-03-2005 15:18:15

[quote638de71005="Tholek"]I thought Maxtor had the highest failure rate among the brands you mentioned?

Sadly, I've had a WD HD go bad, so I'm now with you on them. (Used to love them)[/quote638de71005]


they are about the same, but i only gave maxtor a higher rating cuase it has a 16mb buffer hard drive out, even though western digital does have the raptor thats 10k rpm its still not typically used by the common user