Which Hard drive is best?

[faheel]

Thought I might pick the brains of you computer literate types.
I need to put a new hard drive in my better halfs computer, and I am thinking along the lines of a western digital or IBM 20 gig 7200 rpm one.
I see the seek time is 9 ms and 8.5 ms respectivly, but not having researched this too well, I would be interested in various pros and cons for either drive, indeed any other make as well I would consider.
The main criteria is that it will not break down!
She is running a 200mhz intel equiped mmx with about 120 meg of ram from memory.

[Mice]

Ah great sandbox aviator!
Is it so hard to send e-mail these days, or am I now not worthy of your consideration!!

For a start, the main deal is whether you have a TX motherboard in the old clunker. If not, you cannot even utilise UDMA2 mode, and almost anything you put in will suffice anyway, no matter what RPM (5400 or 7200).

The other problem you will have is the BIOS. On the older equipment, the BIOS does not recognise HDD's above about 8Gig, assuming your motherboard is reasonably new (less than 2 yo). Also, you will need to run Win95 OSR2, or above with FAT32 partitions if you want windows to be able to access more than a 2.1G partition.

Either of the drives you mention are of good quality if correctly handled/packed. The seek time will not be noticeable on something this ancient. Basically, it is what is available at the best price. I would stick to the main brands (Quantum/Maxtor/IBM/WD) Some of the newer ones on the market have been problematic (Fujitsu, Samsung etc) and you may have better support if anything does go wrong in any event.

If you really need the 20G, you may have to replace the motherboard. Why not look for an 8G (if you are lucky). I am sure she will not need much more than that, it hold a lot of e-mail!

BTW, love the bit about the better half, bet you never say that to her face.

Cheers

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When all else fails, read the manual!

[Damsel]

Ahh Mice, always so eloquent and pleasant.
xxxxxxx

[faheel]

Thanks mice, will copy the relevant pages out of her motherboard book to you and you can let me know if its feasable or not :)
ps sent you an email with the url my browser continualy opens with, must be in the registry methinks

[Mice]

OOPS, sorry sand rat, did not realise the better half needs to get a life as well! Better be careful what I put on these pages eh!

As bespoken, short of getting the BIOS code (on the bottom of the first screen during boot up) and trying to get it cross referenced to the award/AMI site, there is no easy way to tell if the BIOS will accept over 8G HDD size. One must put it in and try.
My recommendation of getting a 8G HDD for safety still stands.

Cheers Damsel, why do we not have your new e-mail address?? Tried to send you one recently, and it got returned.

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When all else fails, read the manual!

[spannersatcx]

Go to the MOB/PC manufacturers website and download the latest BIOS if you don't already have it. Normally there is a description of all the BIOS updates there and you will probably be able to see what sort of HDD it will support. Or e-mail their TS and they will let you know.
if you want an ATA 66 HDD, you can get a pci card from http://www.novatech.co.uk that will give you an ATA 66 bus controller and a couple of USB ports to boot.
the other option is a scsi drive, although faster they are more expensive and require a scsi card. I have read reviews that give the IBM HDD top marks, but they normally come as a bare drive and no disk management software, people like http://www.smcdirect.co.uk when supplying a HDD include some disk management software. depending on what you want to do on the PC, having a super fast drive may not be necessary on your 200mmx as you wouldn't see any great advantage as the CPU probably wouldn't be quick enough to see any improvement. You would also have to look at other possible bottlenecks that you may have i.e. graphics card, before you would see any advantages of having the faster drives.

[Speechless Two]

faheel - I have an old Pentium Pro 200 (four years old) with a VS440FX motherboard, the hard disk of which I have just upgraded with a Seagate Barracuda 28 Gb 7200 rpm UDMA-66 drive. This drive was the best IDE drive in PCW magazine in March. I was teetering between the limits of bravado and minimal knowledge in doing this but my experiences might be of help to you and others. My next step is to upgrade the motherboard and processor to get the full potential of the drive.

I ordered the drive through Dabs Direct who continually changed their delivery dates on me. After a month of this I cancelled the order and got one from SMC within four days. It’s not much use having the cheapest prices if you can’t deliver the goods on time.

I bought a Promise ATA-66 Controller Card from jungle.com for £46 and installed it in a PCI slot. It has its own BIOS (I still have the original motherboard BIOS version that came on delivery) so this gets over all the problems of the 8Gb limit with that chipset. The card also comes with a UDMA-66 ribbon cable.

As spannersatcx says, Novatech do an ATA-66 card with USB support. I bought this before the Promise card but could not get it to work even though my computer met all the requirements, ie PCI 2.1 compliant etc. Neither Novatech tech support nor the manufacturer could get the thing to work for me and I got my money back even though when tested by the manufacturer it was in working order. The Promise card was a dream to install and was designed much better than the Novatech one from the point of view of ease of connecting up cables and identifying IDE 1 and 2 once it was installed.

My only real problem was not realising that the drive was shipped in UDMA-33 mode (mode 2) – there was nothing in the manual to say that this was the case. The program needed to upgrade to UDMA-66 (mode 4) has to be downloaded from the Seagate website and can only be run whilst the drive is connected to the motherboard IDE connector – it will not run if you are connected to the Promise IDE connector!! In the near future Seagate are going to include this program on the Disk Manager software that comes with the drive. I can’t honestly say that I can tell the difference between UDMA-33 and –66 operations.

The other problem I had was that having used the very simple Seagate Disk Manager to fdisk and format the new drive it I was unable to use Partition Magic 5 to change partition sizes. After much deliberation with Partition’s technical support it became clear that the only way to get Partition Magic to work was to fdisk and format the drive again using DOS commands. This solved the problem – but by this time I had reloaded most of my programs and backup file data only to lose them again of course!

Hope all this helps.

[faheel]

Thanks guys,
My eyes are glazing over at the thought of doing this now, a bit more involved then I thought.
Ahh well I can hear the cursing and swearing right now, and it wont be from me!
If I don't get this right Damsel will not be pleased.
So it would seem if I want to buy anything larger then 8 gig, I would have to install an ATA-66 controller card as well.
Ok will look into it a bit further now.

[This message has been edited by faheel (edited 04 June 2000).]

[Flying Banana]

A good site with info in plain english on everything you need to know about PC's/upgrading/hardware/software/etc./etc. is http://www.service911.com they even have online video tutorials.

A great place for cheap priced computer bits is www.scan.co.uk (http://www.scan.co.uk) they also are very helpful with info. Check out their 'todays offers only' for some awesome prices on all sorts of stuff.

Speechless Two, I also had a nightmare experience with Dabs Direct, ordered a modem off them with next day delivery, after four days and endless promises I cancelled the order and went to www.simply.co.uk (http://www.simply.co.uk) who couldn't have been more helpful and efficient. Then got credit card statement to find out Dabs had billed me TWICE for the modem they hadn't supplied, took about a month of stroppy emails to customer services and a threat of legal action before they refunded the charges, without an apology, I'd advise anyone out there to avoid Dabs at all costs, and they still have the cheek to keep sending catalogues even after four requests to stop.

[Speechless Two]

Flying Banana - yes, I had the same trouble with Dabs Direct debiting my credit card after they assured me that they had not done so as it was not their policy to debit the card until the item was in stock and about to be dispatched.

In my case they debited the card two weeks into my four week saga with them. The item was never in stock and all I got was feeble excuses from them. I eventually got my money back but I will never order from them again.

[Feline]

Faheel - Just to complicate your life a bit more you might want to think about the following reasoning for going SCSI.

I specified a SCSI disk on the last system I purchased - sure, it cost a bit more, but my reasoning was that when I needed more disk space (and that's about as immutable as day following night!), I would relegate the original SCSI disk to a stand-alone SCSI enclosure (a two bay enclosure purchased down Tottenham Court Road for about £80)and simply slip in another (bigger) drive.
It's very useful indeed to have a large (well, 2.1Gb in this case) drive that you can connect to any system that has a SCSI interface. I also purchased (for about the same price) a SCSI PCMCIA card, so I can really put my Toshiba Libretto 50-CT (with its piddling 850Mb drive)on steroids when I need to.
Just a thought to complicate your decision process! :)

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Feline
(I Sit, I Watch, I Smile)