Primary Hard Drive Replacement

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Technochicken

Posts: 716   +2
Last night I booted up my computer, and it took about a minute to get past the bios screen. Once it had, it said something about "error reading startup disk," or something along those lines. I put in my Vista disk to do a restore, and once it loaded the files, it sat at a blank screen for half an hour. Then the hard drive started clicking, so I powered off, and the drive has been clicking ever since. I've thought up some options for replacing the drive, and I was hoping for some input as to which I should go for.

1. RMA the drive. It is should still under warranty, but I have never heard anything good about Hitachi drives from people at TechSpot. With this option, I am afraid that it would just die unexpectedly on me again.

2. Buy a new 500 gb drive.

3. Buy a new drive and a copy of Vista 64 bit with a Windows 7 upgrade. At some point I will be upgrading my video card to one with more than 256 megabytes of ram, and that will cut out of my 4 gigabytes of ram, which is already crippled to 3.25 gb's by Vista 32 bit. I figure it is more sensible to upgrade Windows when I know I need to do a fresh installation than to wait, and have to delete my perfectly good one when I upgrade my ram or video card.

4. Buy a 64 gigabyte budget SSD. For the price of windows and a 500 gb HDD, I can get one with about 135 mb/s read and 100 mb/s write. This will barely be able to hold all my software, but it will easily be able to hold anything that really needs speed, like photoshop or games. Also I do not really have to worry about it spontaneously failing. With that speed is it really worth it to increase the price of the drive by 100 $ over a 500 gb, and sacrifice all the space?

Any better ideas or sudgestions? Thanks a bunch for any input!
 
(sort of) Good news

Well, I figured out that in fact my secondary hdd is dead, not my first, so all I had to do to get windows up and running was to fix my master boot record. Unfortunately, I hadn't had a chance to back up anything on that drive, so I lost about 7,000 photos from stop motion shorts I make, 10 full length movies, and seven gigs of downloads. I sure have learned my lesson about backing stuff up. :( Soon I'm going to get a 500 or so drive and an external one also. Man, my computer really hates me right now...
 
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