Topic: hard drive

[dave500]

my computer has a thrashy sounding hard drive and it just rebooted itself,i have everything backed up,the board isnt very old but the drive was a 200 gig used one,i can buy a 500 gig sata for 49 bucks,is sata better over ide?,my board supports it.

[SteveD CB500F]

Yes (in a word)

I bought a reconditioned 1Tb SATA drive on eBay for £30 - I've named it "The Dustbin"!

[Blasbo]

Another vote for SATA. The place I used to work has a disk duplicator. It will copy the entire hard drive which saves the hassle of restoring from a back up.

[Skunk Stripe]

Does your board support raid? if so, get 2 drives and mirror them. Same performance but if either disk goes, you are protected as the data is the same on both drives.
Or you could do striped. Big performance increase but if either drive goes, well thats bad.
If you really got money to burn, get 4 drives and do a raid 0 + 1, striped and mirrored.

[SteveD CB500F]

I just use one of the free backup utilities (SyncBack I think) and synchronise "My Documents" every night.

[dave500]

thanks fellas,ill go the new sata,we have a long weekend again and ill probably finish early today so itll be clean install time(again,just did it two weeks ago)in the past ive tried those drive copy programs with limited success,fail to boot etc.,my neighbour is a programmer so if i get stuck i call him over for help,i have an old standby rig to keep going,if the noises this drive is doing were coming from a transmission youd have to pull over!

[fmctm1sw]

The very first SATA drives were not really any faster than the fastest ATA drives at the time.  I learned this the hard way when I went to upgrade.  The latest SATA is what 3GB now?  Make sure you're certain what spec your motherboard supports...

[dave500]

thanks fellas,i got it reinstalled last night,seems to start up and shut down faster,things open faster,plus no noise.

[tramp]

gotta question
my computer is a gateway about 5rys old
put in a better video board and more ram
have 500g memory
bi heard that the processors are alot faster now
is it worth buying a new computer or just upgrading what i have?

[fmctm1sw]

gotta question
my computer is a gateway about 5rys old
put in a better video board and more ram
have 500g memory
bi heard that the processors are alot faster now
is it worth buying a new computer or just upgrading what i have?

500GB of memory?  Holy crap!  I assume you meant a 500GB hard drive.  Gateway is a proprietary maker so while you could probably upgrade the CPU, your mobo and other stuff may still cripple it.  And you more than likely couldn't get a standard ATX mobo to fit.  I've always cobbled mine together.  You can get a barebones (or DIY as they call it now I guess) from newegg or someone and use your existing hard drive and RAM maybe.  I used this when I was looking around a few weeks ago for stuff...  http://www.cpubenchmark.net/

[Gordon]

gotta question
my computer is a gateway about 5rys old
put in a better video board and more ram
have 500g memory
bi heard that the processors are alot faster now
is it worth buying a new computer or just upgrading what i have?

When you look at some prices for a complete system, especially if you go for refurbished instead of brand new, it starts making less sense to upgrade an older machine.  A faster processor means a new motherboard, which will probably need new memory to match, and a new higher wattage power supply, and so on...  Take a look at these at Micro Center:

http://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.phtml?sortby=pricelow&N=4294967292%2B519%2B41&sht=Any&prt=NewProduct

[dave500]

i also cleaned and replaced the thermal paste on the cpu,might have been overheating?

[tramp]

is a 2 core better than a 1 core?

[Gordon]

is a 2 core better than a 1 core?

If you like to simultaneously use multiple applications that take up a lot of processing power, then dual core can allow you to do that more easily and without slowing things down as much.  If not, then you probably don't need a dual core. 

[Skunk Stripe]

Do the dual. For the price, don't bother with single core anymore. Many programs are written to take advantage of dual core these days. Besides that, very few single cores are even made.