old Hard drive opinion and request

[claynation]

Ok, first off, I have owned only one name brand computer, and it was a 75mHz packard bell purchased at sears in 1995 for 2500$. Since then, I have purchased individual components, and put it all together.

Largely, the only problems I always have is with the Hard Drive and using windows. I cannot get over how well windows runs on a fresh format for the first 2 days. Almost as if windows needs a secondary os built in to accomodate new programs like internet explorer, or games so that "It" could be the one you wipe out instead of the main OS. But after reformatting a 40 gig hard drive 20 times just to reinstall the OS gets old, so I started partitioning.

My first mistake was not researching what I wanted out of each partition enough so that I had to repartition over and over, which in my opinion is why I have so many bad blocks/sectors in turn causing random reboots.

Also, I am by no means financially independant, so I cannot just go to the store and buy another hard drive. My question now would be:

Once I buy another hard drive, if I partition it, should I limit the new partitions to any set capacity? And should I have no more then 4 logical drives in the extended? And is their any software that would help me with the hard drive I have now?

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

I don't partition drives much now as I use 2x pysical drives for my PC's, but partitioning and formatting do not cause bad sectors. Bad sectors are caused by internal hardware manfunctions and stuff like drive heads hitting the platter.

 

[claynation]

Well, this 3 yr old SEAGATE HD must be warped inside. I know I will get one of those 37gig 8mb cache/1000rpm HD's from newegg when I get some $$, but what brand should I consider!

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

Well, this 3 yr old SEAGATE HD must be warped inside. I know I will get one of those 37gig 8mb cache/1000rpm HD's from newegg when I get some $$, but what brand should I consider!

The best brand IMO are Seagate and Western Digital. However the raptors are a waste of money for the small speed difference.

 

[claynation]

thank you.

 

[JLobes]

The only reason to get a raptor or any other 10000rpm drive for that reason is for fast load times. If you have a raptor RAID, windows will load wikid fast, but personally, 10 seconds of my time isnt worth the 200 dollars.

 

[Shannon]

I usually use 20-30gb partition for the OS, and save everything else on the secondary drives, etc.

I have recently checked this out, and it seems that the 250gb drives are the best value as far as price per capacity.

 

[claynation]

Well, my thinking was that if I were to get that new 512 pci express vid card, and do an amd 3#00 with 2 gig ram, I would feel better knowing the HD was making things run that much smoother.

But on the other hand, if my 40gig 4mb/8000rpm seagate hd has flaws in craftmanship, and the most common cause for a hd to become cluttered with bad sectors was the cylinder bumping into the internals, then me getting a Faster hd regardless of cache would just make things worse.

This has been very uplifting. I think I will just go with another 40 gig with a larger cache. I have no need for any more then 40 gigs. All I run are fps games, photoshop, . . thats about it

 

[talldude123]

75Mhz for 1995? wow, computers have gone a long way since '95!