Uh Oh, Hard Drive is on verge of death

[Drew99GT]

My computer wouldn't boot this morning. I found on the Dell website a way to run a diagnostic deal, which I did and the hard drive is working now but still making noise. It's about to die! My brother says to get a Western Digital to replace the p.o.s. that came in my Dell. Good? What's THE BEST hard drive to get, one that won't **** out after 3 years. Also, backing up. I just back my stuff up on CD-RWs. I'd like to get an external USB flash hard drive or maybe like a 4 gig USB flash drive. Any suggestions on easy ways to keep stuff backed up? I don't really want to shell out a load for Acronis True Image but my brother says the software that comes with external hard drives will allow you to make a diska image so you can boot of f of the external and copy it to the new hard drive and have the system EXACTLY how it was before the internal drive crashed. Thanks for any help.

 

[Jim 5]

I think Norton Ghost will also make an exact copy. a second redundant hard drive in your desktop set up to back up daily with norton ghost would likely give you certainty. Hard drives are pretty cheap these days.

 

[Oldmoparguy1]

I use a 80Gig USB connected external HD. Nowdays you can get a 160gig for about the same price.

 

[sprintman]

A good reason to run O&O DriveLED as I do. EK Polk does too i believe. Realtime HDD monitoring and drive temperature in a small window on your screen. I purchased O&O Toolbox which includeD O&O DriveLED. German sw company

 

[tmorris1]

quote:

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Originally posted by sprintman: A good reason to run O&O DriveLED as I do. EK Polk does too i believe. Realtime HDD monitoring and drive temperature in a small window on your screen. I purchased O&O Toolbox which includeD O&O DriveLED. German sw company

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Try HDD Health from panterasoft.com which is free. It monitors the smart diagnostic data from the hard drive and displays it. It does more than DriveLED and is free. Try it. In my experience a hard drive will just die without much warning. Usually when you get a warning it too late. I have been lucky to get data off of a drive when it started making noise before it died, but usually they die suddenly.

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

Drew, I like Western Digital's 80GB with the 3 or 5 year warranty from NewEgg. I buy batches of these at a time to update older computers. They're quiet, faster than those old 20GB/40GB models, and cheap...usually about $48 or so from NewEgg. OnTrack makes a progam to grab data off errant hard disks...EZRecovery, it works great. It's saved my butt on a few hard disks.

 

[Volvohead]

While I run twin Raptors in RAID 0 for an OS drive, the best drives for reliability at the moment seem to be Seagates. I prefer the latter for data storage.

 

[Drew99GT]

Well, the old beast still boots up alot with noise and groaning. I've got a Seagate 40 gig external on the way to back up my stuff. Western Digital offers a 3 year warranty on the units sold through NewEgg; Seagate offers a five year warranty. So you guys think Seagate would be the way to go for the new internal hard drive? CompUsa has some 40 giggers for less than 50 bucks. I have a 40 gig drive now and with all my pics/vids/music, it's still about 70% free, so I don't need a huge one. Thanks for the opinions and info fellas.

 

[friendly_jacek]

quote:

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Originally posted by Volvohead: While I run twin Raptors in RAID 0 for an OS drive, the best drives for reliability at the moment seem to be Seagates. I prefer the latter for data storage.

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Ditto on Seagate. Not the fastess but one of the quietest and most reliable. Cheap, too, especially with rebates.