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So I go to turn my comp on to check forums and email, and I hear this knocking sound. Ohhhhhh no....that can't be good. After a reboot, I determine the knocking sound is coming from my hard drive. Looks like the arm inside broke. So now I'm decomissioned for a few days until I can get a new HD. Does anyone have a suggestion?

Should I go Western Digital or Seagate? The Western D's are far cheaper by the looks of it.

I can get a 500 GB 16 cache SATA Western D for $129 after rebate. Good? bad? ugly?

I need to purchase something from a brick and mortar, I can't wait for a mail delivery. I use the comp for work as well as play. Any suggestions would be helpful, thanks.

Just for fun, just before I got back to Canada my dad's pc lost a 1 year old WD drive (usualy they are better then that, going to get warranty) , it would run but a block of the drive was trashed, got the data off it but it was done. So ya seams liek the year for hard drives to die lol.


right now the segates are faster and come with more cache

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148288

I have the 750 version of that one I liek it, pc is fast so can't complain. Actulay sopose to be faster then the previous generation of WD raptor drives. but WD just released there new generation a few weeks ago so those win out again.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136073

thats closest WD equivalent.

Look at toms hardware charts to see speeds. Do made dam sure you clock the show all link else lots of drives missing from the list, includign some segates. I jsut looked and ya the 7200.11 series is next to top raptor drives.


As for reliability, I have used WD, Segate and samsung, had at least one of every brand fail on me even, but in general all seamed good. Personally I like Segate, they are usually very good. Wd same thing solid drives. Now note in user reviews people saying they have drives fail, ok um be carful as if my drive is fine I don't post a review if it is broken I complain so those numbers are not that good.

Now if you do go segate make sure its a 7200.11 series, not even the 7200.10, price usualy the same but there is a speed and cache difference. I do not now the current WD codes for newest version.


O and yes I had to re format my drive a while ago in my system, that was because of hard drive curruption from the motherboard SATA drivers being crap. Using stock windows ones now no issues, just in case you think it was drive failing.

Sorry to hear that Grifter. Maybe we'll do some flying next week then.

hmm no stores have 7200.11 in stock. I might have to fast order it from newegg afterall. The first one you listed looks like a great drive.

ya mpost placess still have the 720.10 in stock. main difference is 16 vs 32 mb cache. In most normal computing eh whatever but in gaming that can't make a bit of a difference in shortening load times and such. I have the 750Gig version of that which is 130$ on newegg. But same thign really. Hell in my system a WD drive a bought a whil ago has been put in so main drive a 750 gig second is a WD 500 gig. so 1.25 TB. Man that will take atleast a week to fill up, better go gt more lol.

but ya most placess 7200.10 will be main one still to kill off stock, but don't be suprised to see sales on the 7200.10 soonish, and hell if good enough price I may get one myself, as hey its still a good drive but then it becomes a storage/backup drive.


Now besides the 7200.11 being one of the fastest drives (WS rapter current generation only beats it) its relay personal preference. IE some like Steel will take WD first, I like Segate in general, I think buff is also a WD guy. some people will say worse luck with one over the other. Myself I have had both, had examples of both dying but also both lasting for ever.

Yeah this is only the second time I've actually lost an HD, so I guess I'm lucky in that sense. I couldn't believe it when I heard knocking coming from the computer----crap, what the heck could that be? A fan blade? no.....ohhhhh man.....there goes my Madden franchise.

I suppose I could stick the faulty hd in the freezer for 24 hours and see if I can crank it up long enough to extract my game data but not worth it.

well I find even with knocking you may get to put the drive in the system as a secondary drive and pull data. Always worth a shot.

Cost you nothing to attempt it.

A drive dying is not that common in all honesty. I would say in my house 20-25 drives have been there in 10 years. thats beteen 2 laptops, dads 3 diffrent pc's, and my 4 pc's. The drive tossed in my dads pc is form a system I bought in 2000, still runes great, that drive it replaced was less then a year old. The origional drive in that system was a samgsung which saw atleast 5 years service before saying bye bye. But hel I have 2 1.3 gig segates, and a 5.7 gig WD drives at home still work I keep as the just in case. sort of thing.

I had the exact same thing happen to me a few months back with a 250G WD data (Games) drive. Fortunately, I was able to backup the entire drive to an external drive before it completely failed. Speaking of which, the drive that was knocking a couple of months ago, well last Friday night during an ArmA mission, the HD finally crapped out. Thankfully I had a brand new 500G drive sitting here ready to goto work. I switched out the faulty drive, transferred the data back onto the drive (Some 8 hours later), and I was good to go.

I highly recommend backing up your HDs, saved me a TON of time and trouble.

RAID-1 Baby. I know it's not fast, but it IS safe.

if the motherbord can do it

Been lucky enough here that i have had no HDD's fail on me ever.

I have a WD Raptor 74 Gb 2 years old, Samsung spinpont 500Gb 1 year old and a Seagate in there, the Seagate is the oldest 80Gig and about 6 years old, I stilll have my original 17Gb Seagate that i got with my first Time PC in 1998 and it still works but i retired it abot 3 years ago as it was basically useless.

Brother had a hard drive related issue last night. He decided time to format pc, he backed up last files to a external hard rive that had all his songs (trust me a LOT) and formats the c partition. Gets Windows back to find out that the external drive was formatted when he formated c: as well. Um oops. I think I will get it back with some recovery program but we will see. but that will learn him and ALL of us, disconect externals drives before formating windows.

actually, raid 1 is plenty fast. it can actually be faster that a single drive and is definitely faster than raid 5 in the write category, and can be just as fast in the read category. both drives respond to the request and the first one done gets the job.

the only thing that might be faster is raid 0, but there is no failure protection there.

if you can afford it, get a WD Raptor (if they are big enough) or a WD RE or RE2 drive. they are raid enterprise drives and have a longer liftetime at a higher duty cycle than desktop drives. our company got WD to start the enterprise classe ide and sata drives a few years ago - too many drive failure in clusters...for our customers. seagate also has enterprise class sata drives, but they are not good to do business with from a large volume point of view - they hosed our company and caused us to lose a several tens-of-millions-dollar-per-year customer.

ya heard that, general Segate drives for home users decent but there enterprise ones for 24/7 365 stuff where not that great for the purpose, WD got them there. I will note enterprise drives generally are a little slower then standard home user ones ie the 7200.11 is a home use drive but is faster then the enterprise but the enterprise even a segate is bullet proof compared to home use drive. But that dose add some extra cost as well. Personlay I liek to put that extra cash to backup drives as even enterprise drives fail, and rather have a external drive sitting there with pictures, resume, music, porn and any other important files sitting there.

porn? LOL

was wondering if anyone was paying attention

Whats the best way to transfer an old 40G hard drive to a new 500G? I wopild like to make an exact copy of my full 40G C: drive, pull it out, put ijn the 500G and viola 90% free disk space. Is there still sector for sector copiers out there? I assusm you would want to run it from some low level OS like DOS running rather than having winXP-Pro running?

um well are you also including the windows installe or just games and such. If just copying files install new drive get windows going then install other drive as secondary and just copy over. If you want full windows and everything I would not know.

use bootitng...copy the partition from the old hd to the new, then expand the partition on the new to fill the hd.