Need quick answer....New HDD Q...

[broderp]

I'm gonna get a second drive for my SAGE box, and I'm looking at making the new one the PRIMARY. I only use this PC for SAGE, DVD, MP3...no games yet.

I will be getting a WD drive with ultra ATA 100, either a 2MB buffer or a 8MB Buffer. 7200RPM. Should be plenty for sage and my system.

My question is to WHAT SIZE drive for WINDOWS XP and SAGE?

Will a smaller drive produce less heat/noise and be quicker to access files?

8MB Buffer VS. 2 MB Buffer??? My current 200GB HD has an 8MB Buffer.

What are the pros and cons, cause Circuit City is haveing a decent rebate right now...check it out:

40GB (2MB, 7200RPM) HD for 29.99
80GB (8MB, 7200RPM)HD for 64.00 (from local shop)
200GB (8MB, 7200RPM)HD for 89.99


What about warranty: I can get these same drives with a 3 year warranty for:

40GB $62.00
80GB $71.00
200GB $122.00

Any one care to express thier opinion and help me decide what is best for my system, given the above drives...

Anyone else ever think so much they just go !!! Drive space vs price vs use vs....for 7 bucks I get a 3 year warranty...but I've never used a warranty......(IT GOES ON AND ON!!!)

[ukmgranger]

Well, having just one drive will create less noise and heat than having 2+. I however like to have prety much just my OS on one seperate drive and a media drive for each type of media (video drive, MP3 drive, etc.)
I am a musician (electronic music) and the theory for the music PC has always been have media drives and OS drives, and never the twain shall meet.

[sadman]

Get the 200Gig. More bang for the buck

[chrysek]

Originally Posted by broderp

I'm gonna get a second drive for my SAGE box, and I'm looking at making the new one the PRIMARY. I only use this PC for SAGE, DVD, MP3...no games yet.

I will be getting a WD drive with ultra ATA 100, either a 2MB buffer or a 8MB Buffer. 7200RPM. Should be plenty for sage and my system.

My question is to WHAT SIZE drive for WINDOWS XP and SAGE?

Will a smaller drive produce less heat/noise and be quicker to access files?

8MB Buffer VS. 2 MB Buffer??? My current 200GB HD has an 8MB Buffer.

What are the pros and cons, cause Circuit City is haveing a decent rebate right now...check it out:

40GB (2MB, 7200RPM) HD for 29.99
80GB (8MB, 7200RPM)HD for 64.00 (from local shop)
200GB (8MB, 7200RPM)HD for 89.99


What about warranty: I can get these same drives with a 3 year warranty for:

40GB $62.00
80GB $71.00
200GB $122.00

Any one care to express thier opinion and help me decide what is best for my system, given the above drives...

Anyone else ever think so much they just go !!! Drive space vs price vs use vs....for 7 bucks I get a 3 year warranty...but I've never used a warranty......(IT GOES ON AND ON!!!)

I have 40GB HD for my OS and then other HD's for media, I think it is important to have separate HD for media since you can format it using 64K blocks rather than default blocks. If you do separate media from OS then probably you will gain in performance, usually OS disk tends to get fragmented (I am not saying media disk will not) but at least you will not mix big video files with small OS/application files.

I would suggest to chose 8mb cache disks rather than 2mb, they tend to be slightly faster since more info can be stored ahead in memory of that disk. Try to get 7200RPM disk for the performance, or 5400 for I guess noise and head concern although I am not sure how much less heat or noise it would produce.

I think OEM hard drives do come with at least 1year warranty, while retail disks do come with 3 year. but you would have to check.

Ah, by the way 10 gig partition for Sage and Win XP SP1 should be more than plenty of space. I have actually few more applications installed and it is still less than 7 gig.

Hope this does help in a bit.

Chris

[Worf]

Check out this deal, today only:
http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=8621

[stanger89]

Go with the 200GB. There are many good points above, about keeping the OS/media separate. But I will disagree with them needing to be separate physical disks. IMO, it's sufficient and probably better (I'll get to that in a minute) to use separate partitions as opposed to separate physical disks.

Why do I say it's better to use partitions? Because separate disks is a major waste of space probably. It's hard to get anything under 40GB these days, but even 4GB is plenty for the OS. So what I would do is go with the 200GB, and put a 4GB partition for the OS/Sage app install, and then the rest for recordings (formatted to 64k).

Actually go with the 250GB for ~$150

[Opus4]

The warranty depends on the mfr -- most retail WD & Maxtors come with a 1 year warranty, I think Hitachi is 3 year, and I know Seagate has a 5 year warranty. The WD & Maxtor usually come with an offer to extend the warranty & perhaps they sell other classes of drives w/longer warranties. (The WD Raptor is 5 years, I just noticed.) What good is the warranty? It sure helps get a replacement when/if the drive fails.

- Andy

[rich_l]

Get the largest one you can afford. You will use the space eventually. Also, it may just be me, but all of the western digital drives i have owned have gotten awfully loud beyond one year of use (Its an annoying high pitched whine, the drive access noise doesnt bother me). Seagate drives are pretty quiet, but i do not have any long term use with them. Just put a 120gb ($50 at BB) Seagate into an office computer and i couldnt hear it with my ear next to the case. Newegg has the 200gb models for $112. Samsung spinpoint drives were really quiet for awhile, but from reports, the latest batches have mixed reviews as it depends from where they were made. They are 160gb for about $95 from newegg as well.

8MB buffer.. Might as well since the price is not that different.

as what was said above, 10gb should be enough for sage and windows xp,the swap file, and various applications you might have. You might want to have a seperate music partition.

For me, warrantys havent been a big issue. The one at the office that i mentioned was a 5-6 year old maxtor pulled from a dell p2-350 that was in an office building that suffered from frequent power spikes. Just look up the return rates with the model numbers through google, im sure there is some data somewhere.

Amd i think your last one, smaller drives may or may not produce less heat. Smaller drives are usually older molders that are left over. It depends on how many platters the drive has, the speed they are rotating at and how often they are accessed. I couldnt tell you how big the platters are, but i would guess it is at 100gb per platter max. (Hitachi has a 400gb drive that has 4 platters, so that is what my guess is based on).

[chrysek]

Guys, I just got Hitachi 400GB HD's, they are so fast. I love those HD's, I wa able to burn movie at 8x DVD, did not try x16 yet... They are not that expensive but with limited space in PVR's and recording sizes space does run out fast. I am looking towards getting into HDTV and I heard 1hour recordings are in about 9gb file sizes... so my advice is get the biggest drive you can afford as somone did mention this earlier...

Chris