In the market for a new HDD

[tom66]

My old Hitachi Deskstar started clicking on boot, and Windows is now refusing to mount the boot disk; sometimes I get a "DISK READ ERROR" from the bios. No biggie, I had nothing important on the disk, just a standard Windows XP install with all the drivers I need for my motherboard (should be fun to find those again, as it's a custom build.)

This drive was purchased as a B-class (return/refurb?) from Maplin Electronics and mfg date is May 2010.

I do not want to buy another Hitachi product (are they even made any more??) as lasting less than 3 years in an ordinary desktop computer is rather poor. I'm aware this is a common issue, I suppose it was only time until it affected me...

So, bearing in mind cost... I'm looking for a drive under £40 (about $65), ideally with a warranty at least 2 years, and around 500GB capacity... I would cope with 250GB or 320GB if the drive brought other bonuses. 7200RPM or 5400RPM is fine. I play the occasional game on this computer and use it to watch videos -- performance isn't critical for me, but lifespan is.

I've already got two 120GB SSDs but they're being saved up for another build. It would be a waste of their power to use it on this build.

Any suggestions?

[mariushm]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

At that price, you're looking at WD Scorpio , WD Green, etc :

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Scorpio-Blue...9232621&sr=1-2
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digi...9232621&sr=1-3
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Scorpio-Blue...9232621&sr=1-1 (320gigs, cheap, but in 2-3 weeks)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Scorpio-Blue...9232621&sr=1-4 (500 gigs but 44 pounds)

http://www.ebuyer.com/272943-seagate...ive-st250dm000 (43 pounds, 250 gigs)

If you don't care about the form factor, ebuyer has some samsung 2.5" drives at 30 pounds.

I don't know how good they are, and they're probably selling cheap because samsung got out of the spinning hard drives business so they're old stock.

[selldoor]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

This one is £40-43 but is £5 postage
Big plus might be 36m warranty

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/500gb...cache-85ms-ncq


and this one - is sata3
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/500gb...rpm-32mb-cache

[momaka]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

I don't think it's just Hitachi that fails. 3 weeks ago at work, we had both a 1 GB WD Green and a 500 GB Seagate fail. Both had very few hours and power cycles on them. They were both part of backup stations - i.e. not moved around a lot and not treated roughly.
It just seems that cheap drives 500 GB and over are not very reliable (unless you go with the expensive models).

[tom66]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

So, I don't really use 500GB (I had about 150GB when it crashed), but maybe downgrading to 250GB or 320GB would give me greater reliability?

[ratdude747]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

So, I don't really use 500GB (I had about 150GB when it crashed), but maybe downgrading to 250GB or 320GB would give me greater reliability?

IMHO, yes. The smaller drives are a more tested design... but many would disagree.

[shovenose]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

Personally I think "older/smaller drives last longer" is a pile of crap.
Personally I would not buy anything other than WD.
This one's decent, 500GB, 7200RPM.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136769
Don't get a WD Caviar Green or Seagate Barracude Green, they are not good for a normal desktop. Better for enclosures, etc.
Oh, and just in case you want to save some money,
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=25561

[tom66]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

One other question. My motherboard natively supports only SATA II 3Gb/s. Can I use a SATA III 6 Gb/s drive, with it running at the slower speed?

[momaka]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

Don't get a WD Caviar Green or Seagate Barracude Green, they are not good for a normal desktop. Better for enclosures, etc.

The dead WD and Seagate I mentioned above were actually in enclosures. But they failed nonetheless
Actually, the WD still works after I did a low level format, albeit with some bad sectors.

[TELVM]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

... Can I use a SATA III 6 Gb/s drive, with it running at the slower speed?

Yep, no problem.

And I wouldn't lose any sleep on the 'slower speed'.

[mariushm]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

Sata III drives are backwards compatible with SATA II so they'll run just fine.

In practice, there's minimal performance benefits to using SATA III from a spinning hard drive's point of view.

Hard drive won't transfer data much faster than equivalent SATA II drive, but the sata III controller inside chipsets or on board may be using less cpu at high throughput.

imho the only benefit to going with small drives is that depending on the version, they may use only one platter and one head, therefore there's less vibration and less noise, and potentially less heat.

However, I personally wouldn't buy such low hard drives, the resell value is minimal. It's much easier to sell a 1-2 TB drive than a 250-320 GB one.

Or, who knows when you later stumble on an old system, or maybe someone donates one to you, and you retrieve the drive from that one to use it on this system, and you might then find convenient to put this 1-2 TB drive in another system.

But I can understand, if it's for a system that doesn't need so much disk space, if you don't plan to sell it at a later time...

I currently have three WD and a Seagate drive, I like both companies. Had Maxtor in the past... never had Hitachi or Samsung so I can't say how they work.

Hitachi got sold, WD took over the 2.5" drives and SSD section of theirs, and Toshiba got the 3.5" division:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5635/w...hitachi-buyout


From reviews, Samsung hard drives seemed to be great, but now they sold the hard drive division to Seagate to focus on ssd drives:

http://www.macworld.com/article/1164..._business.html

So whatever Hitachi and Samsung you see would be old stocks. Not that the cheap WD wouldn't be old stock, they may very well be, but at least you won't have warranty issues.

[DerStrom8]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

I'll be selling the HDD from the computer I just bought as soon as I can get the two that will be coming to me soon. 500GB, but it's not a SSD. You good with that?

Other problem is shipping. I'm in the US, shipping to the UK could pose to be a problem....

What do you think? Worth trying to work out, or would you rather look for other leads?

Good luck!
Regards,
Matt

[tom66]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

Personally, I'd rather buy a drive I've got a warranty on, just for my personal assurance.

Also, I do not plan to re-sell the computer at any time. It still uses a 9800 GT and an AMD FX64 X2, which is a nice fast processor, but no competition for today's processors. It's been put together from spare parts; mostly from my brother who upgrades every few months (that's where I got the 120GB SSDs from too.)

[Gariarto]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

These days I will only buy WD. Black series for me and blue series in customer machines unless otherwise requested. I rarely have problems. Used to be a seagate fan up to 2 yrs ago and their firmware fiasco ended that relationship.

[tom66]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

Well, I am amazed.

I contacted my techie friend who does a lot of computer repairs and he lent out me his copy of a program called "HDD Regenerator".

Ran it. Found one bad sector; 5 seconds later it repaired it.

Windows now boots.

[DerStrom8]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

Well, I am amazed.

I contacted my techie friend who does a lot of computer repairs and he lent out me his copy of a program called "HDD Regenerator".

Ran it. Found one bad sector; 5 seconds later it repaired it.

Windows now boots.

I wish there was a "thank you" or "+1" button on this site

That will come in VERY handy. Thanks for sharing!

[Gariarto]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

I've had mixed success with HDRegenerator. It seems to be fine while there's only a few bad sectors on an otherwise OK platter, but when its an old drive and HDR is finding hundreds of bad sectors there's been little success. I guess when the coating on a platter has had it, then that's all there is to it.
Glad you got a result Tom but I wouldn't trust that same drive much longer. Transfer your stuff while it lives !

[momaka]

Re: In the market for a new HDD

I usually use HD Tune and do a full surface scan on the drive and note the number of bad sectors in S.M.A.R.T. Then I do a zero fill / low level format using HDD Guru's Low-Level Format tool. After that, another HD Tune scan and check if any new bad sectors appeared.
If you do this several times and bad/pending sector count doesn't increase, then the drive has probably stabilized. Just monitor S.M.A.R.T. daily after that for a month or so. If no change, chances are it may not give problems again.

Some drives will stabilize after finding a bunch of bad sectors and then never give problems again. Almost all of my used drives have at least a few bad sectors.
The worst I have is a 2.5" Seagate HDD from a Xbox 360 - it has 1767 bad sectors and almost as many pending. Been stable for a year now though after I did a scan on it and let it map out all of its bad sectors.