Hard Drive Question For The PC Buffs

[Guest 6.8 AR]

But at enfield's price, guess I'd do that.

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[ted]

I've got a pc Sony laptop 15" with windows xp on it 1.2 ghz and I think a 30 gig hard drive with 256 m ram all recovery cd,s it runs smooth .i went to Mac and I have no use for this pc laptop YOU can have jest pay for the shipping how about that for low cost . Love my mac's Thay jest work

[subsonic]

Seagate or Maxtor, new. I have piles of external drives I use for backing up sessions in my recording studio, both brands have held up well. Try directron.com as a source.

[mikegideon]

Seagate or Maxtor, new. I have piles of external drives I use for backing up sessions in my recording studio, both brands have held up well. Try directron.com as a source.

I haven't found one brand that's immune to failure. I'm a stickler for new drives because of the amount of time it takes to bring up a Windows machine from a freshly formatted drive. I've never been fortunate enough to have a Ghost image when working on a friend's machine. So, it turns into a 6 hour slog by the time you istall your 4 year old version of XP, suck down all the updates, and then load all the other software that most folks use.

[kb4ns]

I've got a pc Sony laptop 15" with windows xp on it 1.2 ghz and I think a 30 gig hard drive with 256 m ram all recovery cd,s it runs smooth .i went to Mac and I have no use for this pc laptop YOU can have jest pay for the shipping how about that for low cost . Love my mac's Thay jest work

I really appreciate the offer, but I have more PC's around here than I can handle at the moment. But, there is a "free for the taking" section in the trading post where I'm sure someone who truly needs it could use it. This is what I love about the folks here on TGO!

[subsonic]

I haven't found one brand that's immune to failure. I'm a stickler for new drives because of the amount of time it takes to bring up a Windows machine from a freshly formatted drive. I've never been fortunate enough to have a Ghost image when working on a friend's machine. So, it turns into a 6 hour slog by the time you istall your 4 year old version of XP, suck down all the updates, and then load all the other software that most folks use.

True that. I use Acronis True Image on both my studio and home machines, huge time saver. I clone a spare drive and drop it in if I have a fatal crash. 20-30 minutes and I'm back.

[vontar]

I would never buy a refub. hard drive. That is a gamble. It has failed once, for what ever reason and they are just trying to recoup their lose on it. Over the years I have found the best bang for the buck is around 100 dollars in price. Under a 100 and you are generally paying more for Gigs and over about the same. Also win XP maxes out in ram about 3.2 or 3.5 depending on the patches you have installed. You can certainly find drives cheaper then 100 and with less gigs of storage but before you buy compare it to ones in the 100 dollar range.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

My "elephant repellant" against having to reinstall everything from hard drive catastrophe used to include True Image but my version of True Image isn't compatible with newer Winders and haven't paid for an upgrade.

Been having good luck lately (haven't got blown out of the water from drive failure) with pairs of drives set up mirrored, Type 1 RAID. Windows 7, at least running the appropriate intel chipsets and the intel driver, natively supports RAID 1 for the boot drive and trivial to setup. Similarly trivial to set up RAID 1's on the Mac.

The Win 7 machine has a RAID 1 with a pair of 1 TB drives and the Mac Pro has a boot RAID 1 with a pair of 2 TB drives and a Time Machine RAID 1 with a pair of 2 TB drives. Have a 2 TB external drive for occasional backups for the Win 7 machine and another 2 TB external for occasional backup of the Mac. Lately use the Win 7 backup utility on pc and apple Disk Utility on Mac. In the past used various third-party tools but the MS and Apple utilities work good enough nowadays for backup. Also save certain critical files on multiple USB Ram sticks and on remote servers.

I had one of the boot drives go down on the Win 7 machine and it kept running fine on the remaining 1 good drive. Just popped up an alert saying the RAID was compromised. So was nervous hoping lightning wouldn't strike twice and both drives fail within a day or two, so hurried up and replaced the bad drive. The RAID rebuilt itself and didn't lose any data or have to spend hours reinstalling from scratch. Have lost either one or two drives on the Mac pro since beginning with the RAID 1 arrays. Can't recall, think it happened twice but maybe only once. It was a non-event on the Mac as well. Just replace the bad drives and let the RAID rebuild.

Its been awhile since doing the procedure, but IIRC the most confusing task (not real confusing, just somewhat a puzzle), was that on both Mac and PC had to do some studying to find out how to tell the software to rebuild the RAID. If remembering correctly there wasn't just a big "rebuild" button you could click. Had to kinda "sneak up on it" to rebuild. Maybe the latest versions are more clearly laid out and don't have that problem.