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!
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!