Additional Hard Drive

[Keithchr]

I have an HP Pavilion 7965 PC with a spare drive bay. I want to fit an additional 120GB hard drive to store my digital video. My current hard drive is a Seagate ST360020A 60Gb Ultra DMA 5400 rpm on the primary ide as master. The new drive will be on the primary ide as slave. All are on cable select.
I am a newbie to this, although I did swap out my cd writer for a DVD rewriter with no problem and I have narrowed down to the following choices:

Western Digital Caviar 120 GB UDMA 100 5400 rpm £62.00 (OEM)

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 120GB UDMA100 7200 rpm £63.00 (OEM)

Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9 120GB UDMA133 7200 rpm £59.00 (OEM)

My questions are:

These products being OEM come with no installing software, but I am right in thinking that I don't need any as I can format through Windows XP (I don't want to partition the new drive)

Are any of the above drives a good choice for storing and editing Digital Video (I use Pinnacle 8)

What is the difference between UDMA 100 and 133

Lastly, would I run into any problems if I fitted a 160GB hard drive instead.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, any help (not too technical) would be very much appreciated.

[Keithchr]

Damn. I meant to post this in the computer forum...my apologies.

[nelson133]

No matter how big a hard drive you add, it won't be big enough. The It's important to know what os you are running and what file format (fat32, etc). This will determine whether or not you have to partition the drive.
I've been building computers for over 10 years, and I have had problems with both Western Digital and Maxtor over the years. I still use them, but not as primaries. Nyah Levi

[dinkob]

Hmm, I haven't used Seagate drives but between maxtor and western digital I would rather go Western Digital.

My brother and father have custom built computers and so far we had 3 maxtor hard drives die out on us. (quick edit: this is the case with 7200 RPM newer drives - one was replaced by Maxtor - they actually shipped to us first, then my father sent the defective one back - great service nonetheless; I also have very old 8 Gig Maxtor and 15 Gig maxtor that are both still very healthy).

I have been using western digital in my computer and they both are still (knock on wood) very much so operational.

For ata issues I found this page so it can give you some information.

http://www.overclockers.com.au/techstuff/a_raid0_ata133/page2.shtml

And yes as much as I like using Fat 32 (I just find it more flexible) NTFS is a must for capturing. If you didn't know FAT 32 file system (in addition Windows 98 and ME kernel I believe) can support files up to 4 Gigs.

I reach that barrier easily, so go with NTFS.

[Keithchr]

Thx for quick reply. I have windows XP Home SP1. NTFS. 512k Ram. The other specs are in my profile.

[reboot]

Seagate has had their ups and downs. They used to be the only game in town, then everyone jumped in with newer, faster, bigger, and Seagate tried to keep up. When the dust cleared, there's Seagate, still making great quality drives, that are also some of the most quiet ones around.
I too have used Maxtor (jet aircraft taking off anyone?), WD, IBM (remember the "deathstar"?), and Quanutm (bigfoot is extinct, thank god).
At one time, I thought 3 gig was overkill, then 30 gig, then 150 gig. Now I'm running 190 gig, and need more. Buy big, even if you don't think you'll ever use it, buy bigger than you need, then buy a bigger one than that, and lastly, buy the biggest you can get, then buy two of them.

[Keithchr]

Thanks for your comments guys...being a newbie - most of that went over my head.....I guess individual manufacturers will have admirers and haters! Could I just reiterate my questions...

These products being OEM come with no installing software, but I am right in thinking that I don't need any as I can format through Windows XP (I don't want to partition the new drive)

What is the difference between UDMA 100 and 133

Lastly, would I run into any problems if I fitted a 160GB hard drive instead.

Many thanks

[XL3/\/7]

Í have 2 seagate hard disk drives with no problem whatsoever. A frienf of mine tried out Western Digital and a year later it appeared to be defective and about 40 gigs of Data were gone 4 ever. Of course that doesn't mean anything and I guess it could happen to all brands. Nevertheless, I wouldn't buy a 5400 rpm HDD over a 7200 one just to save $1. If I were you, I'd go for the faster HDD and reformat my PC so that my OS was on the faster drive and use the older 5400rpm drive as a backup.

BTW, I have to agree with REBOOT. You will never have enough storage, especially if you are into video conversion anf stuff like that. The bigger the better.

[andyp1]

When I bought a maxtor 60Gb about a year ago it was OEM and being an unformatted drive it wasn't recognised. After stuggling for what seemed hours I went to the Maxtor website and downloaded a programme onto a floppy from there which when I rebooted (bios set to A first) it walked me through step by step and was easy in the end. I just looked on there for the model of my drive.

To be able to format the drive it needs to be recognised by your PC in the first place. Which is what the boot bisc did and allocated a letter to it.

If you are going to to put the two drives on the primary cable you should set the boot drive to master and the second drive to slave , and the connector on the end of the cable is for the master and the connnector in the middle or part way down is for the slave. Position your HDs so the IDE cable fits comfortably.

Of the three drives you definitely want a 7200 speed and not 5400 (the faster the better.

not certain about the 100/133 point or the issue of XP and drives over 134G or whatever the limit as I haven't quite reached the limit yet.

[Keithchr]

Many thanks Andy.

Very helpful. I think I will get the Seagate as that has support for auto detection of master/slave drives that use cable select and I need to make this install as simple as possible due to inability!

[Edwin01]

Be careful,

I does not recomend you to buy a Seagate HDD. I'm telling you this because after eight Seagate drives died after just 3 months of use, I don't thrust that brand anymore.

Right now I'm using 2 Serial ATA Western Digital (WD1200J) 120 GB RAPTOR drives on my computer and also 2 Western Digital Parallel ATA (IDE) WD800BB (80GB) 7200 rpm HDD on external USB 2.0 Cases, and they're all working fine. And they're not noisy.

And this is not the first time I chose Western Digital over other brands, I've been using this brand since 1998 and no problems at all, and I will not use any other brand than that.

I've been building computers for a long time, and this hard drive brand is, at least for me, the best I've ever used.

About the Cable Select thing, you just need to have a cable which can handle Cable Select auto detection. Since your computer already had some of their drives set to CS auto detection, then you can plug your new WD Hard Drive inmediatly without problems. The configuration jumper on WD hard drives comes in the CS position from the factory.

You should not have any problems with those drives.


Good luck!

[iooi]

Running 2 seagate 120's, 2 Maxdor 120's and a WD 120 in the same box...Seagates are the quitest by far to the point of silence others make a tolerable level of noise on disk access.
Only thing to really say is make sure they are 8 Meg buffers and not 2 meg, Makes such a vast diffrence to speed of doing things. All have been running for 1 year no problems.. .

[Keithchr]

Very grateful for all your replies guys...I have a final question on this:
What's the difference between a UDMA HDD and an ATA.....Is this critical? Can I fit either in my machine.

[Shudder]

UDMA basically says it's a drive made in the last 4 years It's the speed at which it interfaces the MB/OS, and I wouldn't worry about it - just some fancy speak to say that your CPU won't be doing a crapload of the work to transfer data.

Don't worry about ATA unless it says Serial ATA, which is probably an interface your HP doesn't have. Most drives have an IDE interface which is about 1/4" by 3" or so, buncha pins. Serial ATA is quite smaller, almost like a floppy power cable, around an inch or so wide at most. Don't get those drives unless you know for certain your MB supports them, but it's fairly new and I'm really doubting HP's doing that these days. So just make sure it's IDE, that's probably all you need to worry about.

And personally I'd go with the maxtor.

[reboot]

Don't be confused by UDMA (all drives built today are) and ATA. The faster, the better (ata133 is faster than ata100), and are backwards compatible. That means, if your computer can only handle ata100, the ata 133 drive will still work, but only at ata100 speeds. No great loss.
Check the specs on your motherboard IDE ports. There may be a size limit in BIOS, which can usually be flashed to correct this.
XP (original) had a theoretical bug for drives over 132 gig. SP1 corrected this, and there's also a hotfix available on the MS site.
I have built approx 500 computers in the past 3 years, all using Seagate (8 meg buffer, 7200rpm) of various sizes. I have had to RMA 2. I would say that's a good average, and I defy Maxtor/Quantum, or WD to come close.

[Edwin01]

You guys are very lucky with those hard drives. However I think I just got a bad group of Hard Drives, because according to the invoice, all the eight hard drives which died, all from the same model and serial numbers : 23353-121EC8895, 223353-121EC8896, 23353-121EC8897, etc.

Anyway, after seeing that all the eight drives presented the same problems at almost the same time, I got suspicious and decided not to thrust that brand anymore.

However, many people here are using them without problems, and that's like a releif for me, and I've decided to give Seagate another try.

__________________________________________________ ___________

For IOOI,

The two 7200 rpm, 120 GB Western Digital RAPTOR hard drives I'm using on my computer, really comes with the 8 MB buffer and as you said, they're pretty fast with those extra MB's.

__________________________________________________ ___________

For Keithchr:

OEM versions and RETAIL versions are both (mostly) the same thing. The only differences are that if you buy the OEM version, which is intended for computer manufacturers, you will get: The HDD in an Anti-Static Bag, and some times (if not attached to the drive itself, a quick setup guide)

RETAIL versions on the other hand, are intended for the final user (that's you), and comes in a colorful box, with an IDE or Serial ATA cable (Drive dependant) a quick setup guide, setup software, 4 Phillips screws, a "Y" power cable or power adapter for Serial ATA models, registration card, special offers, One month of Free Internet , packing material, and any other thing the manufacturer decide to put in the box, along with the drive.

And also, RETAIL versions, are more expensive that OEM versions, but this is compensated by some manufacturers (if not all of them) by a 3 to 5 Years Warranty Card.

Anyway, what you get at this point is up to you.

Ah, and Western Digital hard drives comes set from factory, at the CS position, so they can use this setting. You only need a CS compilant cable and a CS compilant mainboard. Most modern mainboards are CS compilant, and If you said, that your HP computer had some of their drives set to CS, then you have a CS compilant mainboard and a CS compilant cable.

Attaching a WD hard drive, should not be a problem for you or your computer.

Well good luck and happy shopping!

[Edwin01]

Not bothered by small problems...
Spend a night alone with a mosquito.

What's the point of spending one night alone with a mosquito, when you can get thousands of them here?


Just kidding,