Advice on new 3.5 hard drive please

[Deano1351]

Helo all, been a while since iv posted so happy new year to everyone! Im hoping to upgrade the internal hard drive on my pc, its currently got a 40gb maxtor which i believe is quite slow and its old so i would like to upgrade before it goes wrong to something reliable and fast, im using an asus p4u-800x motherboard. Iv got an external hard drive for movies and music so really i only need the internal for the O/S and basic programs so i want a good fast hard drive for this purpose. Also does anyone have any links to guides on swapping the info from one hard drive to another, cheers Dean

[Murf]

See no one came by.

I would recommend either a Seagate or Western Digital drive. Maxtor is way down my list. Choose one with a 7200rpm, they do make 10000rpms but not sure of the performance gain. Also it should have at least 8MB buffer.

Example:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136112

To "Ghost" a hard drive to another partition or hard drive: Obviously you will need software to do this:

Commercial Norton Ghost is the best. Free several out there.

http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/ranish.html

Also Western Digital has its own.
http://support.wdc.com/download/inde...pid=999&swid=1

[Deano1351]

Thanks Murf, ill get down to my pc store and look for something with that spec. Is it risky at all trying to swap everything from one hard disc to another?

[Murf]

Transferring from one drive to another is fairly simple if you follow the instructions. An alternative is keep current drive and install a second one for storage. You can move everything but programs from the old to the new using cut and paste. This would free up space on the main drive and give you lots of storage on the 2nd drive.

Norton Ghost is a great easy program, but if you are only going to do this once then probably not worth the investment. However, you can use to back up your drive to another periodacally.

http://search.ebay.com/search/search...host&category0=

[errolo]

I would also like to sing the praises of Norton Ghost. I was moving from a 80GB drive with about 40GB of data and OS. I was hoping to use NERO BackItUp to do it, because I own a copy, but there was problem with the drive that prevented me from doing so. To complicate the whole thing, old drive=IDE, new drive=SATA.

Friend, who was helping me, had legitimate Norton Ghost on his pc. We installed both HD's (80 & new 320) in his, formatted new, ghosted the 80 to the 320; worked beautifully.

Installed the new HD in to my new PC, did a reinstall/fix of Win XP OS, reactivated and everything is up and going just fine.

Man, I was not looking forward to reloading all my software and then copying over all the data and that was my last resort if Ghost had not performed as advertised.

cajun

[Deano1351]

Ok interesting, thanks guys, all i really want is a good quality fast hard drive to hold the o/s and a few small programs, internet stuff and media player etc, im just worried that my existing hard drive will fail me soon so i dont want to keep much longer incase it does. I dont know much about them but i imagine a smaller capacity good quality hard drive would have a fast read speed and be reliable, thanks for the info on swapping the data over, it sounds like something i could manage myself, fingers crossed!!!

[mervin]

Don't waste your time buying software to clone your drive. Seagate has wonderful free software that you can use to clone your hard drive. I'd recommend you get a seagate drive. You can download Seagate's cloning software (for free) from their website.

Keep in mind that the speed of your computer is going to be at the mercy of your weakest component. IDE drives (the one your computer is probably compatible with) aren't as fast as the new SATA drives.

[Deano1351]

My external hard drive is a 320gb seagate and iv had no problems at all with that so id definatly consider a seagate internal one. I see what you mean about the sata and ide differences, mines definatly ide only, do you think it will make much difference in speed by upgrading the h/d or am i wasting my time/should i go for a faster cpu instead?