Hard Drive Question For The PC Buffs

[kb4ns]

I'm fixing a friend's mother's PC and need advice from the computer gurus. Her HDD is bad and I'm searching for a replacement. After a few years with this computer, she's added less than 500mb of stuff, so storage space is not an issue. She's wanting it fixed as cheaply as possible, so I've been looking at 40-80GB hard drives. My question is this - the prices for brand new generic (or "house brand") HDDs and the refurbished well-known brands are roughly the same in price. Which one would you go with? Disk speed and space is not important since she probably won't be doing anything fancy. I know that the hard drive game is a crap shoot no matter what you choose, I'm just wondering what y'all think would be the most likely to last a while?

[Caster]

Eeew gross! PC? Really?

Seriously, which one has a warranty? If neither has a warranty, I'd be more inclined to go with a known company. Someone that will be there when you call up swearing at them.

[mikegideon]

Buy new.

[Slasher]

Personally I would go with a refurb well know brand over a generic brand. There is no telling what parts or QC they use with the generic brands. At least with the well know ones you can be pretty sure they have been checked out and may even come with a year or two warranty on them.

I'll look Monday when I get back to work and see if I have anything laying around in that size range. When I get rid of systems at work I pull the HDD's out and get rid of them separately, I'm probably too anal about security. They are still good when I pull them out, I just don't like giving them away without a secure wipe. After a run through with Spinrite and everything passes ok they would probably be as good a generic drive although a little older.

[mikegideon]

Not saying buy an off brand. We buy lots of hard drives (few hundred computers to keep running). Would never consider a refurb. If they don't replace ALL the moving parts, it's impossible to qc for existing wear until something is close to failure.

[Garufa]

Buy a new name brand drive, i.e. Seagate/Western Digital. Low capacity drives are not that expensive. Go with whatever is cheapest at Best Buy, Staples, Office Depot, etc.

[kb4ns]

Eeew gross! PC?

Yeah. They're like Macs, but they sell for well under a grand and you don't have to visit the Apple Store and/or buy a whole new PC to upgrade or fix.

Seriously, which one has a warranty? If neither has a warranty, I'd be more inclined to go with a known company. Someone that will be there when you call up swearing at them.

At the price of an 80GB HDD, I'm really not planning to ever use the warranty. It'd cost nearly as much to ship it both ways as it would to buy another.

Thanks for the other input guys. Slasher, I'll wait and see what you can find Monday. I don't have a problem buying the drive if your company has something setup to receive funds for sales of that nature.

[kb4ns]

Buy a new name brand drive, i.e. Seagate/Western Digital. Low capacity drives are not that expensive. Go with whatever is cheapest at Best Buy, Staples, Office Depot, etc.

There's a huge price difference there. We're talking $20 or so compared to $60+. Can't justify the difference for a senior citizen's computer.

[mikegideon]

There's a huge price difference there. We're talking $20 or so compared to $60+. Can't justify the difference for a senior citizen's computer.

And, you enjoy working on Mom's computer so much that you don't mind doing it again

Edited May 19, 2012 by mikegideon

[kb4ns]

And, you enjoy working on Mom's computer so much that you don't mind doing it again

Touché.

I'll take my chances, though. Don't think the woman is on it an hour per week.

[krunchnik]

One thing too think of,the initial size of the hard drive is used by windows itself,the install could eat as much as 40 gigs itself,which would leave roughly another 40 for everything else.

[kb4ns]

One thing too think of,the initial size of the hard drive is used by windows itself,the install could eat as much as 40 gigs itself,which would leave roughly another 40 for everything else.

True. It's running (and I will be reinstalling) XP. If memory serves, I don't think XP realistically uses more than 4 or 5 GB, but I think at the price range, I'm probably gonna try to go at least 80GB.

[Sam1]

I'm fixing a friend's mother's PC and need advice from the computer gurus. Her HDD is bad and I'm searching for a replacement. After a few years with this computer, she's added less than 500mb of stuff, so storage space is not an issue. She's wanting it fixed as cheaply as possible, so I've been looking at 40-80GB hard drives. My question is this - the prices for brand new generic (or "house brand") HDDs and the refurbished well-known brands are roughly the same in price. Which one would you go with? Disk speed and space is not important since she probably won't be doing anything fancy. I know that the hard drive game is a crap shoot no matter what you choose, I'm just wondering what y'all think would be the most likely to last a while?

I've got a couple of 500gb 3.5" WD drives, if you need one I'd take $15 to cover shipping and shoot one to you (Or I could throw it in a normal flat rate box instead of fedex'n, think those things are only $5-$6 now). I just need to wipe it first

Edited May 20, 2012 by Sam1

[Guest Nikator]

Check with Computer Renaisance or another local shop. If you have time order from Newegg or Tigerdirect.com. Some of the local shops will match online prices.

Any Seagate or WD drive is fine. You could also Ebay a used one for cheap.

Just make sure you get the right connection.

[Caster]

Yeah. They're like Macs, but they sell for well under a grand and you don't have to visit the Apple Store and/or buy a whole new PC to upgrade or fix.

[Sam1]

Just make sure you get the right connection.

yeah those ones I have are sata2 - if she only has a 40gb drive in there now it is more than likely a pata

[hornett22]

I'd never buy a refurb. New is the only way to go.

[BigK]

I'd buy a refurbed 40 gb WD on NewEgg for $20 shipped. It has a 30 day warranty, but if it doesn't fail in the first month it'll probably be fine anyway.

Edited May 20, 2012 by BigK

[Guest Lester Weevils]

I used to favor seagate drives but have had some runs of lemon seagates. They are probably still good drives but the only drive brands have not encountered at least one lemon, IIRC are WD and IBM/Hitachi. That is not to say it is impossible WD or IBM/Hitachi could have lemons, but I've used quite a few of each brand encountering nary a drive that didn't at least stay healthy for a couple of years.

Installed one of those seagate "mutant combination of hard drive and RAM drive" in the mac laptop which it has run fine for about a year and still seems healthy, so its not like I completely gave up on seagates.

Have got the impression that quality control on drives is not as good nowadays. It seems kinda rare to get more than a year or two service out of em anymore, but perhaps it has to do with the capacity being so much bigger nowadays versus price.

I wouldn't buy a refurb. Its dicey enough getting yer money's worth out of a new one nowadays.

Maybe a warranty would be useful on a retail external drive bought from some place like best buy so you can just carry the thing back in the store a year later and maybe they will replace the item without too much hassle. But I only tried calling in the 5 year warranties on bare drives one time when I had a slew of identical seagates that all decided to die in less than a year. It was too much trouble compared to the money saved. They made me download a certain in-house disk utility and run the utility on each drive (which seemed to take a long time per drive). And print off the diagnostic output from the testing utility program. Then send the results of the testing runs to get RMA's. Then when the RMA boxes showed up, pack up the bad drives and send em off to the factory and wait a long time. When the warranty replacements arrived I was aggrieved to discover the company had sent me REFURBS, and the dang refurbs were just as flakey as the bad drives I sent back. GRRRR. I developed the paranoid theory that maybe they just run a quick test of returned drives and if the flakey returned drives happen to pass a quick test, maybe they were just sending em back out as warranty replacements. Surely the company wouldn't do something like that...

So its lots easier to first place the bad drive on a rock or other hard surface, and then whack the drive a couple of good licks with a sledge hammer so identity thieves can't realistically recover data off the drive, then toss the bad drive in the trash and replace with new.

If it is an older puter that came with a relatively small drive, I'd try to replace it with about the same size drive it shipped with new. Some of the older firmware was not smart enough to handle "huge" drives, and some of the old chipsets can't even handle "huge" drives properly.

[fury2neon]

Sheldon uses a PC by the way.

[kb4ns]

The HDD I'm replacing is a 160GB SATA. I've been looking at pricewatch.com (one of the sites I used to use often back in my nerdy days) and have found that the 80GB generic or refurb'd name brands are available for under $20 shipped.

Lester, I agree with you. Once upon a time I was a Seagate fan, but they started letting me down and I tend to levitate to WD now. When it comes to my PC's, I always spring for the best new WD I can get. Buying a small, cheap hard drive is opening up choices I've never considered before.

Sam1, I appreciate the offer. Since he's local, I'm gonna wait and see what Slasher can dig up (I'm sure I've got some brass I can trade him or something!). If it doesn't pan out, I'll definitely holler at you!

Thanks y'all.

[Caster]

Sheldon uses a PC by the way.

There's also an iMac on the other desk.

[Daniel]

They all use PCs to game.

[enfield]

I've been buying pulled drives on Ebay and haven't had any problems so far. I have a pulled 80 Gig SATA in this computer, and just bought two 320 Gig Seagate pulls for an upgrade. I got the two Seagates for $25 each - shipped.

[Guest 6.8 AR]

Just get a new whatever cheap SATA drive to

replace it with. Storage is cheap. Why get a refurb?

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