I need a new hard drive, any suggestions?

[CheezeFlixz]

I need a new hard drive, any suggestions?

My office computer HDD finally crapped out it was on bowered time anyway and I knew it, so everything is backed up that matters (I think). About a year ago it took a lightening strike and never did act right after that, I alway had to hit F1 for it to boot. So now I'm getting a "A disc read error occurred - hit CTL ALT DEL to restart".

I checked the cables they seem fine, I think the MBR or the zero sector is bad. I ran a recovery from the XP Pro install disc with no luck, frankly I'm not going to waste a lot of time with it as it might be recoverable, but it's questionable anyway after the  lightening hit and HDD just don't cost that much anymore. This winter when I have more time I might fool with it seeing if I can get it to work, or I might just use it for skeet ... PULL!

Anyway it's SATA 3.5 drive on a Dell XPS Gen2 3.0 Ghtz with 4 gigs of RAM of that matters.

I'm looking at the  Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3250310NS 250GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148309

I was also looking at the the 500GB and the 750GB not real sure what I'd need that much room for most of my mp3's reside on a dedicated external drive I can move around and I don't remember the size of the failed drive I think it was either a 80GB or a 160GB.

Any feedback on these or others?

Thanks in advance.

[AndyC]

The Barracuda is exactly what I would have recommended. Good drive for a good price. I've got three of them running RAID0 and two in a NAS for backup, and they work just fine. Good value for the money.

[CheezeFlixz]

Yeah there cheap like $80-$100 depending on size, I might set a RAID0 up on it and just get 2 of them, the system is designed for 2 SATA and 4 EIDE drive which I have a few that I never use other than in external I've turned them into.

Thanks for the info I was looking at those or the WD Raptor 10,000 but they seem to have a lot less space.

[Derf]

That is also the drive I would have recommended. I've been building systems for a long time (16 years or so), and Seagate drives have proven to be the most reliable overall. They are the only drives I use anymore. The larger drives are cool, but do you need that much space? For most things, a 250 GB drive is plenty big enough. If data security is your biggest concern (over speed), you might also consider two drives in a RAID1 setup, so that if one dies, the other still has everything.

[CheezeFlixz]

Alright if at some point I want to try and recover the data off the dead drive is there a program that works. I think it's the MBR that is no good on this drive but I'm not sure it was working fine except for the F1 on boot up issue and it just died while I was out. So I don't know exactly what, when, where etc. It might still be accessible as a slave it might just be a paperweight. 

I know I have few things on it I'd like to get but I'm not going to panic if I can't get them. The most important files I have are backed up in 5 locations, records, quickbooks, taxes, etc ... the stuff that really matters (to the IRS at least).

So anybody know of a good program for this recovery? I've looked around and there seems to be about a million of them. I use to do this is DOS, which is very, very consuming. Hoping to fine something that will read the drive and just copy the entire drive to a folder on a new primary drive. I know there are a lot of new programs out there now that weren't around when I fooled with puters more.

I'm fairly computer savvy, but I do not claim to be a guru.

[Andrew]

For software-based recovery, which is going to be your only economical solution, I have had fair results with Active@Undelete.  The two times I have not been able to recover anything were a serious mechanical failure, and another was a firmware-caused issue that completely hosed a hardware RAID array.

[CheezeFlixz]

I ran a quick diagnosis from the boot menu of the drive and the BIOS saw the drive but returned a FAIL message (Error 7) so I'm assuming the drive readable but has a bad MBR. I don't think it would be a drive hardware problem since the BIOS see the drive.

Would this be correct?

I just want to drag the info from the old bad drive to the new drive, cheaply. There is nothing on it I can't live without, but would like to recover some stuff if I can.

[Andrew]

That the BIOS can see the drive is encouraging.  The one case I mentioned of a badly fubar drive was a time that the BIOS could see the drive, but nothing could use the drive in any way.  You couldn't read from it, partition it, format it, nothing.  From what I could tell, the reading heads could no longer find their "zero point" so they could no longer locate specific points on the drive surface, meaning actually using the drive was impossible.

DO NOT partition, format, or otherwise write any data to a drive you want to recover information from.  Any time you change the drive you make recovery more difficult.

[CheezeFlixz]

DO NOT partition, format, or otherwise write any data to a drive you want to recover information from.  Any time you change the drive you make recovery more difficult.

No I've ordered a 2 new drives (Seagate Barracudas) and when they comes in I'm going to slave this one and see what/if I can get anything off of it and it I can I will and then that drive is going to the skeet range. I take it that program is Winders interface?

It's my office computer, so it's not critical I have it running ASAP I can use my laptop.

[Trevor]

and then that drive is going to the skeet range