Need help with selecting new HD

[Toragana]

I need to get a new HD because mine is starting to fail (not fun at all). I just never realized how many options there were in regards to HDs. I know that I would like at least 160gb drive at 7200rpm. Money wise, I don't want to spend over $150. I don't really do much with my comp except play video games, schoolwork, music, watch videos. The computer is an older HP running a 1.6gig athalon xp Could you guys point my towards a good HD? I've tried to determine whether or not I should go with SATA or IDE and can't really decide. Is there a noticable speed difference between the two? All help is greatly appreciated.

 

[zephead]

wait til SATA II, it is said to be of excessiveley good performance.

 

[MrDJ009]

Are you sure it's failing?

How do you know the drive is "starting" to fail?

I assume you're running a version of Microsoft Windows. What happens when you run Microsoft's scandisk and defrag programs. Do they complete successfully? If your drive is really failing a #1 priority should be to back up everything ASAP (to a CD-R, tape or wherever).

What size and type of HD do currently have? How much free space is available? These answers will help determine what type of replacement drive you need. A 160GB sounds great but may be overkill.

 

[Paul]

I need to get a new HD because mine is starting to fail (not fun at all). I just never realized how many options there were in regards to HDs. I know that I would like at least 160gb drive at 7200rpm. Money wise, I don't want to spend over $150. I don't really do much with my comp except play video games, schoolwork, music, watch videos. The computer is an older HP running a 1.6gig athalon xp Could you guys point my towards a good HD? I've tried to determine whether or not I should go with SATA or IDE and can't really decide. Is there a noticable speed difference between the two? All help is greatly appreciated.

Theres not much dif between sata and a good ide 8mb cache,just make sure you do not get a 2mb cache,some shops will try to push these or sell them to get rid of their old stock,and if you dont know what cache is you end up with a slower drive.Go with western digital or sea gate.

 

[Samstoned]

if your machine has bios issues with booting SATA's watch out
if you are not doing anything extreme stick with iede 8mb cache seagates 7200rpm most of your performance will be noticed in memory and cpu ,front side bus speeds and some tweaking on indexing and paging.
I don't like putting all my eggs in one basket buy 2 smaller drives have one set to time out when not in use.