What are my HDD upgrade options?

J

Jestah

Veteran X
Ok I'm in need of a new HDD as my current one has loads of bad sectors and is warning me to backup and replace.

My mobo is a
Asus A8V Deluxe (ASUS A8V Socket 939 VIA K8T800Pro Mainboard Review (1))

I've only ever used a normal IDE HDD and don't really know what Serial ATA or RAID means.........

Firstly, does anyone have a consise article on Serial ATA and RAID as opposed to my normal IDE.

Secondly, will my mobo support those?
 
riad is a way of effectivly combining multiple drives in to one... sata is a serial interface that is faster than IDE. Everything is going to SATA so there is no reason not to go to SATA. you have no need to know anything about raid :)

yes your board can use SATA. you may need to put a driver disk in when the os install says "if you need third party drivers insert driver disk now".
 
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....but they are 10k rpm I suppose.

Don't really have the money to justify that atm so I'll be getting a normal 7200 WD or Seagate or something.

Thanks for the help guys.
 
The current $/GB on the 7200.10 Seagate drivers on NewEgg:
Code: 
GB	$	$/GB
250	69.99	0.27996
500	139.99	0.27998
320	89.99	0.28121875
400	119.99	0.299975
200	64.99	0.32495
750	254.99	0.339986667
160	56.99	0.3561875
80	43.99	0.549875

You didn't mention the size of your current HDD, so I don't know what is appropriate, but I assume that either the 250GB or 320GB would both meet your needs and be within whatever your price range is. There is another 250GB 7200.10 on NewEgg for like $2 less than that one I listed, but it has half the cache (8MB instead of 16MB)...the extra cache is worth the $2.

I have 3 of the 320GBs and a 250...all in working order :)

I can't see why you would need to do RAID at this point.

If you can wait a little, though it sounds like that would be a bad idea, the 320GB HDDs go on sale like every other week.
 
I've currently got a 20GB Maxtor (7,200 8MB) which ive had for 5 years and is still going solid as my system drive.

And an 80GB Western Digital (7,200 forget cache) for data which is fairly new, but broken, fails its SMART test on "Re-allocated Sector Count" - 131 when threshold is 140, whatever that means.

I've actually had that SMART warning for about 6 months now; have to hit F1 on startup to carry on loading windows. But the disk seems to work fine.

Infact I might look how long the warrenty was on that.

I've also got a 320Gb external western digital for backup.....

The 250GB w/ 16MB cache would probably do me for a good while. I'm in my final year at Uni so money is still a bit tight.
 
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