I've done something stupid

O

okayplayer

Weaksauce
Joined
Apr 1, 2007
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70
I broke off part of the SATA connector on my Seagate 320g 7200.10 tonight (don't ask).

It still boots (thank god, I am backing everything up now), but I've had to secure the connection with.. well, electrical tape. I'm looking to get a replacement drive asap and have a few questions

1) Looking for something low-noise. I've heard the Samsung Spinpoint's are great but the only place I can find them for sale is tigerdirect.ca (I am in canada). Any other suggestions for quiet drives?

2) When I upgraded to a Seagate a while back, there was some built in/free software that transferred everything from the old HD to the new HD (including operating system, i didn't have to manually copy anything, it was great). Do most drive manufacturers offer this service? What's the easiest way to go about this?

Thanks.
 
acronis true image 11 has a 15 day trial that is fully functional. do that.
 
One better Seagate DiscWizard can be downloaded from Seagate's website free and works on any harddrive

its by Acronis so its probbaly a watered down version or a full version im not sure, either way I used it to clone my boot drive from an old ATA drive to my current SATA drive and worked like a charm
 
I had a defective WD hard drive, it still worked but windows vista wouldn't defrag so I ran a diagnostics tool from WD website and it turned out that the rpm's were too slow, It was in warranty so I got their free replacement and used acronis to clone the new hard drive and everything is still working fine.
 
The SeaTools now has Acronis True Image as part of the toolset; it's watered down in the sense that you can't do everything with it that the retail True Image can, but the basic purpose - imaging a drive or doing a disc-to-disc clone in real-time - is very functional, and it's free for Seagate/Maxtor drive owners. Highly recommended for such purposes.
 
Excellent, thanks very much for the replies everyone.

If anyone has recommendations on HD brands I'd love to hear them. I know it's pretty much subjective and in the end, x's drive is likely to be just as reliable as y's drive, but I'm still curious. I've always stayed away from WD in the past (heard some horror stories long ago) but I hear they're much more popular now.

Seagate used to be the king, I think, but it sounds like the only thing they have going now is the long warranty.

I would prefer something quiet (and big, 500 to 1000 gig, undecided) and was looking at some hitachi's. thoughts?
 
The Hitachi 1TB drives are relatively cheap compared to others (Fry's had them for $249 a few days ago, bare OEM drives), and according to the first rounds of testing they're great performers. I had an IBM "Deathstar" years ago, the dreaded 60GXP line, even the specific model of drive that was known to literally implode itself after a random amount of time. I didn't hear a peep outta that drive for nearly 6 months then I started to hear that dreaded "Click of Death." I shut the PC off, put the drive in the freezer for 20 mins (seriously, it does wonders sometimes), then pulled it out and let SpinRite run a level 5 diagnostic (yeah, gotta love that Star Trek reference) which took 22 hours. After that, no more clicking.

That "Deathstar" lasted me for 5 more months without another peep, click, tick, hum, anything. I sold it to a friend when I upgraded and he knew full well what drive it was and what reputation it had, and I explained my experience with it. Two weeks after he bought it, he got the clicking, did the same thing I did. Put the drive in the freezer for 20 mins, pulled it out, ran the same level 5 diagnostic with SpinRite, backed up his data, and 2 days after that the bearing seized up totally making the drive a brick. It was fast and solid while it lasted, and well worth the $100 I put into it back in 2001, but it did live up to its "reputation" and finally imploded. :D

My personal brand of preference is Seagate for one reason: they are the only brand of drive that has never ever gone bad on me. Ever, and that's over a 30+ year career (yes I'm old). Their products have never gone bad in my own personal hardware nor in any machines that I've built (I'm close to 5,000 custom builds over my career, from the first screw to the finished product, no assembly line bullshit - I build 'em start to finish) and the are the only brand I recommend to people that come to me for a custom machine.

Now, I know other people have had issues with Seagates - I know of one guy that bought 2 750GB drives earlier this year for his monster custom built PC he put together himself and within 2 months he had to replace them, but the new ones are working fine so far.

And I've heard other horror stories too, but for me, that's my brand of choice and why, aside from the fact that they're fast, cool, and quiet. At this moment I'm on a Dell Precision 530MT workstation built and shipped in June of 2002. It's got the original Seagate U160 73GB 10K SCSI drives in it (2 of 'em, non-RAID) attached to the Adaptec U160 controller. They're old, they're quiet (seriously, they are) and they perform as expected for such older drives - right where the benchmarks from late 2001 showed them, so I'm happy with 'em personally.

Western Digital drives, they're a toss up for me. I've had some last, some go bad, etc, probably like most people. I know a guy that bought the original Raptor drive when it first appeared, the 8MB 36GB model years ago. It went bad in 3 weeks. Returned it and got another. The second drive died in just under 3 weeks. The next replacement didn't make it a full 14 days, then the 4th drive died inside a week after arrival.

That's 4 Raptors inside 3 months - not a good sign. But apparently Western Digital has come a long way with the Raptor reliability - this story comes from 2005 or so, and I haven't heard any significant cases of such horrible product reliability since then.

Maxtor was horrible years ago, they really were, but when they finally got the right combination of hardware and management for a brief period of time, they produced some damned fine drives. The Maxtor DiamondMAX 10 lineup was and still is a great line. I have a 250GB DiamondMAX 10 SATA drive that's consistently performed well for me for 2 years now as a simplistic backup drive, no issues to speak of.

Others like Toshiba (laptop drives), Fujitsu, Samsung, etc... I don't have as much experience with in terms of failure or longevity.

But my personal choice is Seagate simply because I've never lost one in my own use over the decades. They've never given me a reason to not use their products, they work, and I'm satisfied with them 100% so far. Can't say that about any other brand. For the price, the Seagate 7200.10 and 7200.11 series drives nowadays are outstanding performers and have an excellent cost-per-gig rating.

Just my $.02 and change...
 
give www.ncix.com a shot, much cheaper than tigerdirect and their service is wonderful. also if you're outside of BC you save on the PST which is always nice. think of them as the canadian newegg:)

if you're around the toronto area, also look up canada computers. another good retailer with many stores around that area.

P.S. i don't know about anyone else, but i've seen samsung drives go bad quickly. wont touch 'em myself. i like western digital personally, but seagate are just as good;)
 
Ghost, thank you very much for the wealth of info, it is greatly appreciated.

I haven't had a bad experience with Seagate either, the only thing I feel could be improved upon is the seek noise. The rest of my system is fairly quiet and the HDD just seems abnormally loud.

I'm starting to think about a Raptor for Vista + games, and a secondary Seagate for general MP3/Video storage... the thing is, my current drive is 320gigs and the biggest raptor (I think) is only 150, so the new drive isn't big enough to have everything copied over to it. If discwizard/Acronis could let me transfer over JUST the OS, that would be perfect. I could then move all my MP3's and Video's seperately to the secondary Seagate... is this possible?

Threshin, thanks for the heads up, those are two of my favourite places to buy. My system was actually purchased and configured from NCIX, and I usually hit up CC for upgrades. :)
 
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