New WD 250 gig HD for $160... ;) I'm sure formatting, and partitioning it will take forever though! And defragging? Yeah, RIGHT!

LOL Don't count on it, it won't last :) They have a way of filling up. I have 3 here's the specs: (150)111GB-57.0GB free (200)186GB-107GB Free (40)34.5GB - 11.96 Free I am constantly moving stuffs around, as a matter of fact it's time yet again. I TRY & keep the top drive listed at 60GB free....I'm off to start shuffling things again.

I've been having a lot of complaints from my clients about those WD 250's. Please make sure you have a good backup and backup frequently. I don't want to start a hardware war so I'll leave it at that.

Two weeks ago I got 6 Maxtor 200GB drives from CompUSA on sale for $129 each. I then placed a special order also for a Maxtor 250GB SATA drive for $209 for my new Athlon 64 system (with WD Raptor 10,000 rpm SATA drive)- when the drive arrived a week later for me to pick up at CompUSA it had GONE ON SALE for $159- so I got a credit back and then went ahead and got a second Maxtor 250GB SATA drive. (SATA drives are substantially faster than ATA drives). Thinking about doing a RAID 0 with them for ultra-fast Poser loading and rendering... My Poser stuff finally has room to breath!

That's nothing. Internal: 80GB - OS; 54GB free 120GB - video capture; 60GB free (varies widely) 80GB - data; 19GB free 80GB - temp backup; 70GB free 160GB - temp video backup; just installed External: 250GB - video archival 120GB - video archival 40GB - miscellaneous large file transfers The OS drive will probably good for a few more years, but my video capture, video archival, and data drives will need to be increased soon.

Veritas777, yeeks! :)

O.o to Kuroyume0161.....OMG!!!!! I'm at a loss for words..which is unusual LOL

Well, I already have my 120 gig as well, so that puts me at 370.. that should hold me for a while. I've found using dvdrs for backups instead of movies is a good thing... ;)

Yes, there are already Dual-Layer DVD Burners out for just $159 at CompUSA which handle 8.5GB (or there abouts) per DVD, so making Backups should increasingly NOT be a problem for most people.

Yup, getting one of those burners. I won't even go into how many drives I have on my 3 den computers alone. It's scarey, the more drive space you have the more stuffage you find to fill them with. O.o Marque

got ya all beat holds up his ancient 12.5 floppy Fear my 5 megs!!!!

Like one of those Sony DRU700s as well (was eyeing one at CompUSA just yesterday), but what's the media cost? O.o Whache? Now I'm afraid! :) I had a friend who had several of those. Sort of like the LP of CDs, the LaserDisc of DVDs. :p As an aside, don't know if anyone watches TechTV's "The Screensavers", but Kevin (host) miffed me the other day. He equated Laserdiscs with 8-tracks! ;) Well, when he can watch the Star Wars Special Edition set on DVD (soon enough, though), I'll forgive 'im. Course, my laserdisc player is shot, so even stuff only on laserdisc (some Japanese stuff, for instance) can't be moved over to DVD video. Darn...

My Laser disc still works fine.. ;)

lol I saw that one kuroyume. Wonder how many people don't know what an 8-track is? heh Marque

OMG! (Hangs head) you guys have me beat....I thought I was the cool Geek with a 40G internal, a 40 external and another 80 external, not to mention my 40G notebook - I defer to ye of many hard drives ;-) 8-tracks? Yep, had a couple and my Dad had one in his truck years ago. I think I actually had a Journey album on one. Yoinks!

2 PCs, total of 9 HDDs, mostly IBM/Hitachi. Some Seagate & WD. Total capacity 1,53 TB (TeraBytes) = 1530 GB Smallest disk is 120 GB, largest 250 GB. But then I work with sound, video, multimedia, Poser, design etc..... And I do the same thiongs for fun as I do for work. Oh, and a bunch of games of course :o) Plenty of stuff is duplicated - copy of files on each PC in case of disaster. Total free space: about 180 GB. :] Fish

Actually my big problem is that I have only 2 possible drive names left on my main PC with 5 HDD's - Y and Z. A = floppy C-Q & S are HDD partitions on the 5 HDD's R is DVD reader X is DVD writer T-W are memory card readers (CF/MD, SD, MS, SM) ... and when I connect the MP3 or digital camera to USB that grabs Y, so really there's only Z left. With both connected, Z is gone too! :o( Can one fool the system to let B go and use it for anything else than floppy? :] Fish

I've got a stack of older computers in the "work" room that have everything from 512MB to 10Mb HD's that I'm trying to con, er, briber, er, talk some bright kid from the computer science department at the University here into making into a server/storage farm for me. I've got this thing about tossing out anything that I can scavenge into something else. Now if I could just use those Oh So Powerful 4Mb RAM chips I paid almost a weeks pay for a few years ago in something... I think the tip about DVD's for storage is a great idea. I have to get my Presario 2100 laptop to the shop so I can get the DVD reset....someone in the household clicked on the regions button until the DVD quit working and Compaq wants me to pay them to reset it...and I guess at that time I'll purchase the software to burn DVD's. As always, great info here in the forum!

I have a 40 GB hard drive and I thought that was so big - hah! I am constantly deleting stuff and archiving to CD's just to get a lousy 2 GB free so I can use Poser. I've got to get a bigger hard drive.

Between my three machines, I only have 1.1TB. Darnit! Darnit! Darn you, FishNose!!! ;0)

Thats why, when I saw what prices are now, I just decided to replace my dvd reader with a new HD instead. Our systems came with a dvd reader and also a dvd writer, for copying dvds, but we've yet to even try copying one in a year and a half. The wife's system is identical, so if we ever DO want to try it, we still can, and my system will be the main system now. We're on a network, so we can share the space, if we need to as well. (she still had about 1/2 here hd free!)

I'm in the market for an external HD. (Internal bays all full.) I've been reading the reviews, and several of them mention that any drive over 180 Gb is prone to errors and crashes. True or not?

And Gareee, where'd you get that price???

Message edited on: 06/05/2004 10:24

Attached Link: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1329777,00.asp

(and it was internal)
Here'e the review I read, and that was with a price of $277...

Message edited on: 06/05/2004 10:58

Attached Link: http://www.nextag.com/Western_Digital_250GB_7200RPM~57283096z3znz300119z1z1z300119zzmainz1-htm

Thanks. I'm leaning toward a 160 Gb Seagate external. It's more expensive than the Maxtor 250 Gb external, but the reviews are better. But it's killing me, to pass up an extra 90 GB and pay more money. ;-)

Yep, I considered the same options, but I don;t want to have to buy another drive in 8 months or so. Plus, I'm limited on space inside the box, and this solution works just fine. Don;t forget there's also the file management overhead in a larger drive as well. The 250 gig only yields 237 gigs of usable space... 13 GIG of overhead! I'm guessing a 160 gig HD will probably only yield 150-152 usable space.

I know, I know. But the reviews and user reports on drives larger than 180 Gb are really unnerving. It's a very noticeable cutoff. People with 200 Gb or 250 Gb or 300 Gb drives report high failure rates. Doesn't seem to matter what brand: Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, they all have the same problems with very large drives. But below 180 Gb, and the reviews are all glowing.

I'm thinking I should wait until they get the bugs worked out. I don't want to deal with a hard drive crash...

I considered that, and might buy the $14 extended warranty for it.(2 additional years) HD crashes are a nightmare (been there, done that), but I feel pretty comfortable with the reviews. I also read nightmarish stuff about XP home, and it's been the most stable OS I've used (Other then Amiga workbench) I've also read nightmare stuff about P5, and have had little or no problems with it either.

How long is the original warranty? The drives I currently have came with five-year warranties, but it sounds like a lot of these new drives have only one-year warranties.

I never heard anything bad about XP (except griping about that activation thing). The good reviews were the reason I went with XP instead of switching to 2000, which I was also considering.

Poser 5...well, I've had a lot of problems with it. I like it, and use it instead of PP most of the time, but I definitely understand why some people have had problems with it. I would expect such an old program to fly on a state-of-the-art computer, but it's still pretty slow. One shudders to think what it must have been like on the average computer when it was released, before all the service releases.

kuro: lol! :o) randy, the 180 GB thing has to do with the max limit in most versions of Windows (I don't know about XP) - max 180 GB on a drive. To access beyond that without an instant massive crash you need a special driver from the HD manufacturer that allow access to the upper ends. Once you have it you're OK as long as nothing above the limit needs to be accessed during boot. Apart from that, there's nothing special about the big drives. In fact, really modern dirves run quieter and cooler than polder ones even though they may be much higher capacity. The main reason driver fail is heat. Probably 90% of failures are due to insufficient system cooling - so I seldom feel much sympathy for crashes - you don't have the fans, you shouldn't run the drives. My main system with 5 HDDs has a total of 8 (EIGHT) fans, 2 on PSU, 3 on chassis, 1 on CPU, 1 on GPU and 1 on bridge. So I keep temps down. Also, if you don't have the backup, you shouldn't run the drives. Like the guy said: Data of which there is only one copy doesn't exist at all. :] Fish

Yeah it came with a 1 yr warranty.. the whole idea now, is to get the extra cash from you with an extended warranty, which goes right back the the manufacturer. I just installed something on the new drver, and even though the old drive was just defragged a few weeks ago, it loads about 10 times faster off the new drive! Guess I'll be running poser 5 off the new one, now! ;)

The only time I've ever had a hard drive crash, it was not a heat problem. It was only 3 months old, and it was a manufacturing problem, I'm pretty sure. They were 500 Mb (LOL!) Seagate drives, and dozens of them crashed, all over the building. We'd had good luck with Seagate before, but that batch was buggy as all get-out. (We weren't the only ones having trouble.) They did replace the drives, but it was a pain to be without one while the exchange was made.

I have had to replace drives since then, but the newer drives tell you when they're getting bad, so I've always been able to do it before anything catastrophic happens.

I realize that you have to take user reviews with a grain of salt, but I can't help noticing the pattern. It doesn't seem like a heat problem. One person reported that half the drives he bought for his office didn't work, right out of the box. Another person complained that his drive crashed after ten days, and when he called to complain, they told him, "Well, every hard drive fails eventually." But you don't see complaints like that with drives that are under 180 Gb. Just look at the reviews at sites like that allow customer reviews. They list the stars by the product, and you can just look down the list, and see the trend clearly.

Anyway, I think most external hard drives have built-in fans, so heat shouldn't be a problem. Though maybe I should make a point of getting one with a metal case, instead of plastic. Plastic is too darn insulating.

randy, I remember testing new drives - this is in '87 - a NEW!! HUGE!! type of drive. Called Rhodime. They were 40 MB - OOOoooooh wow that was huge. DOS 3 couldn't handle more than 33 MB so we had to wait for a new version to get at the last 7 MB (in an extended partition) Every single one of those drives failed within a few months. And Rhodime vanished off the scene.... I've had a failure recently too. One out of about 60 drives I've used in the last 15 years. An IBM 120 GB that I managed to save the data off by letting it cool to room temp, then starting up and copying off it like mad for about 10 minutes until it got about 35 deg C - then switch off, wait an hour, etc... all day. So I saved the lot and got a replacement drive, it was 6 months old. That was the famous DeskStar generation of drives (aka DeathStar) a couple of years ago, the drives with the famous 'Click of Death'. And the reason that IBM gave up HDs and sold out to Hitachi. Of course there are drives with problems out there. I know that - but the main reason for failures is certainly heat. The average chassis and PSU out there (even big brand PCs!) is not really up to the job - and the reason? 1. Keep costs down and compete with price = lousy fan & PSU 2. The eternal quest for a quiet PC = Slow fan which is quiet but deadly. I bought a new PSU last year, a test winner with top marks, quiet and good they said. It was a disaster! Temp went through the roof all the time and I had to switch back to my old supersonic diesel tractor PSU - but it keeps cool! Running Poser with that new quiet PSU was impossible, on render the CPU would nearly melt down, it was scary. Of course external disks is a different thing. Then the issue is more to have the external box in a place with good ventilation and not under a pile of junk. In fact, nothing stacked on top at all. :] Fish

It was mostly external HD reviews I was looking at. And the ones with the big-ass fans didn't seem to be any better than the "quiet" ones. Though they did cost more...

I wonder if it's the software (driver) that's the problem. Some people mentioned that when they reformatted the drive, it worked again. But who wants to keep re-formatting their hard drive? If I wanted to do that, I'd still be using Windows 98. ;-)