I wouldn't have a Dell computer, but I've seen my friends go through several Dells and I've never seen one have hard drive problems. They always end up being replaced before there are ever any drive problems. But then when I needed to strip my friend's old Dell that was no longer working so I could get some spare parts to build a temporary (and slow) computer, I noticed it had a Western Digital 120GB hard drive in it.
I bought two identical Western Digital 320GB hard drives a few years ago. One failed after two years and the other is still going strong. A long time ago in 1994, I had a 200-megabyte (300 with disk compression) Seagate hard drive in a Compaq Presario 433 (monitor and computer in one unit) (my first and only off-the-shelf PC purchase (the rest I have build myself)), and when I went bonkers in 1997, I picked up the computer by the wires, twirled it around, slammed it up against the wall, and threw it into a bathtub full of water. Then it sat in an old rent-house for a few years with no environmental controls. A couple or three years later, I went to get the hard drive to see if I could get any of the data off of it. Remarkably, I was able to hook it up and get all the old data I wanted. Some of the images were slightly corrupted, but that was understandable considering what the drive had been through. The fact that it still worked at all was amazing to me and it gave me a really good impression of Seagate.
Enter 2013 and so much of what I hear about Seagate is trash-talk and that they're no longer what they used to be.
So I wondered about Dell hard drives and if anyone had any experience with them.
I know any hard drive can fail, but I got some Christmas money and currently all I have is one 320GB Western Digital hard drive. Like anybody else, I hate it when something dies before its time. One Western Digital hard drive fails, and suddenly I'm left with PTSD over all hard drives.
I don't even know why I'm posting this, actually. It's like I want someone to tell me which hard drive to buy and then have everything be okay, and I know that just isn't realistic. But there HAS to be a best hard drive out there for regular non-professional computer users. I want a GOOD drive, but I can't spend $12,000 on it. I'm thinking a couple of 1TB hard drives will be fine because I've heard that the failure rate on 2TB drives is definitely higher than it is on 1TB drives. I plan to keep using this 320GB hard drive since it already has Windows 8 up and running with no problems.
I plan to use the two new drives to archive data off the 320GB drive, and I plan to use them both for (a) redundant backups and (b) video capture. I'm not a huge data hoarder. I like to burn files to discs as soon as I have enough of one category of data to burn a single disc, so I don't plan to just keep a lot of data lying around on the new drives. This will probably leave me with a lot of empty space most of the time, but then I like that.
Finding a brand of power supply was easy. I found a survey in which a vast majority said they would get a Seasonic power supply, so I got a Seasonic and I've been happy with it, though it's less than a year old. Much better than the Thermaltake Smart-M series which died on me when it was less than a year old. Trying to find a similar survey for hard drives has been fruitless.
Okay, so I'll just ask here. What will your next hard drive purchase be?
I bought two identical Western Digital 320GB hard drives a few years ago. One failed after two years and the other is still going strong. A long time ago in 1994, I had a 200-megabyte (300 with disk compression) Seagate hard drive in a Compaq Presario 433 (monitor and computer in one unit) (my first and only off-the-shelf PC purchase (the rest I have build myself)), and when I went bonkers in 1997, I picked up the computer by the wires, twirled it around, slammed it up against the wall, and threw it into a bathtub full of water. Then it sat in an old rent-house for a few years with no environmental controls. A couple or three years later, I went to get the hard drive to see if I could get any of the data off of it. Remarkably, I was able to hook it up and get all the old data I wanted. Some of the images were slightly corrupted, but that was understandable considering what the drive had been through. The fact that it still worked at all was amazing to me and it gave me a really good impression of Seagate.
Enter 2013 and so much of what I hear about Seagate is trash-talk and that they're no longer what they used to be.
So I wondered about Dell hard drives and if anyone had any experience with them.
I know any hard drive can fail, but I got some Christmas money and currently all I have is one 320GB Western Digital hard drive. Like anybody else, I hate it when something dies before its time. One Western Digital hard drive fails, and suddenly I'm left with PTSD over all hard drives.
I don't even know why I'm posting this, actually. It's like I want someone to tell me which hard drive to buy and then have everything be okay, and I know that just isn't realistic. But there HAS to be a best hard drive out there for regular non-professional computer users. I want a GOOD drive, but I can't spend $12,000 on it. I'm thinking a couple of 1TB hard drives will be fine because I've heard that the failure rate on 2TB drives is definitely higher than it is on 1TB drives. I plan to keep using this 320GB hard drive since it already has Windows 8 up and running with no problems.
I plan to use the two new drives to archive data off the 320GB drive, and I plan to use them both for (a) redundant backups and (b) video capture. I'm not a huge data hoarder. I like to burn files to discs as soon as I have enough of one category of data to burn a single disc, so I don't plan to just keep a lot of data lying around on the new drives. This will probably leave me with a lot of empty space most of the time, but then I like that.
Finding a brand of power supply was easy. I found a survey in which a vast majority said they would get a Seasonic power supply, so I got a Seasonic and I've been happy with it, though it's less than a year old. Much better than the Thermaltake Smart-M series which died on me when it was less than a year old. Trying to find a similar survey for hard drives has been fruitless.
Okay, so I'll just ask here. What will your next hard drive purchase be?
