Hard Drive - Good buy?

[Zxian]

Hey everyone,

I need a quick bit of input for this clearance item that I saw today. I don't know how long this price will last, since it's a clearance item.

Specs:

Model Number:ST3200822A

Capacity:200 GB

Speed:7200 rpm

Seek time:8.5 ms avg

Interface:Ultra ATA/100

Link

For $125 CAD, I'm guessing that this is a pretty good buy. I've been looking to upgrade my hard drive in my desktop for a while, and I've been waiting for a good deal.

Any input would be appreciated. I'd like to buy this either later on today or tomorrow.

Cheers!

[puntoMX]

Good drive, I like to use them here too in my cybercafé. They are quiet, fast and reliable. I use WD too, but they are slower, noisier and produce more heat.

price, I can´t tell, I don´t know the prices over there but it must be some thing like 80 Euros or 100 US$?

[Zxian]

Yeah, it's about $100USD.

Here's the 7200.8 model... for $5 more and I get the full 5 year warranty.

Link

Apparently this one seeks faster since the data density is higher.

You haven't had any problems with reliablility? It's hard to find a good source on reliability since I've heard from lots of people that all of the big three are either great or horrible...

[puntoMX]

I would go for the .8, it’s a bit faster with throughput then the .7 so it’s not only av. seek time .

I used for years Maxtor, but they are not as good as WD or Seagate. Samsung started to make nice ones too, with IBM/Fujitsu I don’t have so much experience..

.

[Zxian]

Ok.... unless someone comes along with a big reason why I shouldn't get the 7200.8, I'll be heading over to NCIX after work today...

Man... 5PM can't come soon enough...

[Bâshrat the Sneaky]

I'd go for it too The 5-year warranty is !

[Zxian]

Yeah, the 5 year warranty is good... if you can keep your reciept for that long... I've gotta set up a system for storing those important little pieces of paper.

[Lost Soul]

i think thats a great buy m8

[gamehead200]

OMG!! BUY IT!!!

That's a great deal!!

[Zxian]

Yep I did. Set me back a whole $149 CAD incl tax.

Now the only thing to work on is getting it to work in DMA mode... stupid PIO.

Oh... sweet..... 500 posts!!! w00t!!!

[puntoMX]

Wow, how old is your machine?

[Zxian]

Soyo SY-K7ADA V1.0 motherboard

Athlon T-bird 1333MHz

It's about 3-4 years old... with the new drive there, it runs like stink tho! One interesting thing about setting up the drive... When windows loads by default, it sets up two IDE controllers, one for each IDE slot on my mobo. The mobo drivers, however, install SCSI-RAID drivers, which device manager now lists as being the devices that the drive is connected to... I'll post a picture of my device manager later on tonight to show you guys. It took me a while to figure that one out... I was trying to force DMA mode by hacking the registry... uninstalling the IDE controllers... etc etc etc

I can now definately tell that my old drive was dying on me... I would get blue screens every second or third reboot during startup (with both XP and 2K3)... now, I've rebooted several times because of software installations and settings and not one BSOD.

I'm probably gonna end up taking the old drive apart, just for fun. It's dying anyways, and I've got all the data off of it.

[puntoMX]

Try a new cable, if your cable is half dead like your old drive I would replace it. The VIA drivers for example switch from UDMA to PIO mode if your cable is bad...

[Zxian]

I'll give that a try and see how things go.

Now that I've got the chipset drivers installed, the drive is running at UDMA133/100 (at least that's what the mobo utility tells me). You can't see this under device manager tho, since the drive is listed as a SCSI hard drive... I don't quite know what that means.