UK-POLOS.NET - THE VW Polo Forum

Hmmm...I'm embarrassed, I've only just started today and have a total of...380mb of MP3! and all from my own CDs!

Just got my first iPod and so are slowing getting in grips with the whole MP3 evolution!

Josh_PoloGTi wrote:I have a lot of music. (39.5 Days)

My hard drive keeps making clonking noises now, so I'm going to buy a new drive asap.

200gb 8mb cache IDE.

Best price I've found is for a Maxtor at £65.50... Can anyone find me a decent branded one for cheaper???


URGENT!

That's an excellent price.. I was impressed at my new one, it's just an 80gb Hitachi, 7200rpm, £35... would have gone for something a bit bigger but as my parents were paying I didn't really want to take advantage. Where did you find that one? Maxtor are generally very good.. I've had quite a few of them, this one is the first that's died on me, and even so I'd given it a lot of abuse and it had been clinging on to life for months

Josh_PoloGTi wrote:I have a lot of music. (39.5 Days)

My hard drive keeps making clonking noises now, so I'm going to buy a new drive asap.

200gb 8mb cache IDE.

Best price I've found is for a Maxtor at £65.50... Can anyone find me a decent branded one for cheaper???


URGENT!

£65.48 for that drive at dabs -- as you'll know , they were the cheapest supplier I could find this weekend.

But - in all seriousness - I would think twice about getting a Maxtor. I've had *2* of that brand fail on me in the past. Seagate have a good rep. The barracudas are supposed to be quite quiet, too. The only thing Maxtor have going for them is price, imho.

Deek.

Haven't really heard 100s of good things about Maxtor or Western Digital, but think i've lucked out with the Maxtor I DO have - 250gb jobbie from when they had just become affordable. Had the odd twinge about it when an odd things happened, but it's holding together fine so far...

However if you have the money, then Seagate, Fujitsu and Hitachi (formerly IBM*) is where it's at. My computer's full of goodness from them and they haven't missed a beat despite running for long periods in cramped/hot conditions for donkey's years.
I've had one, maybe two Seagates fail on me before. Soft fails. After suffering quite nasty impacts. They are hardcore. The Fuji/Hitachi ones lasted a full course and have gone on to other owners despite similarly ruthless use.

And www.ebuyer.co.uk or www.novatech.com.... let me have a quick look at prices and edit this up

PS don't think 200gb is still the best price point right now, it's sitting closer to 120gb in terms of bang for buck - if it doesnt have to be contiguous disc space, or you can deviate a little from 200gb, and you have the spare cableage/power/noise tolerance, perhaps a pair of discs to replace? 2x80, 2x100, 2x120, or a mix............

* i think they are anyway.. there's a couple brands beginning with H, one's independent, one merged with IBM? They've put the Deskstar 75XP fiasco behind them btw. Actually ordered up a Western Digital 180gb at one point, was DOA, sent it back and asked to try an IBM in it's place (had originally avoided because of that selfsame rep)...... no regrets, apart from it being slightly slow and slightly noisier than the other discs in my machine (250g max, 40g seagate).

PS I can't beleive how cheap 40 thru 80gb discs have become these days, it's insane.



EDIT prices............

The dreaded Western Digital - 200gb, IDE, 7200rpm.... only a paltry 2mb buffer though, the swine. £65 including VAT from E-buyer, whose delivery prices tend not to suck.
Despite being crap in my eyes, 19 people have voted and given it a 4 and a half star rating. Apparently so long as you dont get one with messed up firmware, you're golden.

One of those with an 8mb buffer - £67

Maxtor DiamondMax-10 200gb, 7200rpm/ATA133, IDE, 8mb - £66 from Ebuyer again (can't be arsed with the pennies!). 5/5 with 9 ratings (oh, no, wait... 3 ratings and 6 nubbins asking bloody stupid questions they should either read more carefully or google for). Probably a more solid choice.

Proper hardcore Seagate Barracuda of same spec - £73

Most expensive drive they have there - a Hitachi Vancouver 400gb model... for £197 plus tax...... ruddy bargain considering how much I paid for my 180gb (a little over £200 if i remember) and there were still much more expensive ones knocking around at the time. Google would be a very cheap website to start these days with three of those and a couple of 4mbit telewest home lines.

Novatech was a dead loss unfortunately - the lower/higher capacity drives are probably better deals than ebuyer, but they go straight from 160 to 250gb without touching 200.....

I'll entertain the fantasy that anyone gives a rat's ass but here's my MP3 collection:

24.7GB, 8,162 files and 600 folders!

Mostly my own stuff too!

Tahrey1043 wrote:Haven't really heard 100s of good things about Maxtor or Western Digital, but think i've lucked out with the Maxtor I DO have - 250gb jobbie from when they had just become affordable. Had the odd twinge about it when an odd things happened, but it's holding together fine so far...


* i think they are anyway.. there's a couple brands beginning with H, one's independent, one merged with IBM? They've put the Deskstar 75XP fiasco behind them btw. Actually ordered up a Western Digital 180gb at one point, was DOA, sent it back and asked to try an IBM in it's place (had originally avoided because of that selfsame rep)...... no regrets, apart from it being slightly slow and slightly noisier than the other discs in my machine (250g max, 40g seagate).

PS I can't beleive how cheap 40 thru 80gb discs have become these days, it's insane.

I haven't heard 100% good things about any hard disk personally.. there will be the odd failure whatever brand you go with, and the owner will doubtless rant no end about how it's such a crap drive when actually they were probably just unlucky. It's only when you get consistant reports like IBM were getting a while ago that you should really start to worry..

I think you're right about the IBM/Hitachi thing.. I didn't know that'd happened, but my new Hitachi disk came this afternoon labelled 'Deskstar'. Can't say I trust IBM entirely since the whole fiasco a couple of years ago, but hopefully they've moved on from there
And, yes, 'small' (huge by my slightly dated standards..) capacity HDD's are ridiculously cheap now.. I would have thought they'd do the usual thing of adopting a larger capacity baseline at around £45 and drop the rest of them like they always used to, but I'm not complaining 80gb for £35 is something I never would have dreamt of even a few months ago...

well i wasnt too trusting either -- but it's done me proud so far.

however i'd have trouble returning to any brand that was responsible for a hard disc that just upped and failed on me out of the blue. if it's not suffered some physcial damage or been completely roasted (either temp-wise, or through the kind of abuse my brother can dish out --- you have never seen a disc so fragged thats been asked to continually load/save so many files, really beating the read/write head back and forth repeatedly back and forth very fast - he probably put 25 years average wear on it in 18 months ... and it still only came up with a couple bad sectors and the occasional full fritz)....... then it should go forever in my mind. random, unprompted fails are a sign of a very poor quality drive.

WD i have heard little good things about and would avoid, unless they've pulled their trousers up (and will soon be in a position to hoik up their socks)

Maxtor... it was only because a large number of existing owners said how reliable it was. Mixed reports for the maxies - some swear by them, but almost a full room of PCs at uni died one by one due to HD failure... all of them being Maxtor. Guess its a case of if you get a good one, you get a GOOD one, if you get a bad one... you soon find out.

160mb more (three of nans Sunday Mirror free discs should cover it) and i'll be ready for MP3 disc no.160....

Well, mine died over a long period of time due to a massive amount of physical abuse.. when I was going through my obligitary geek phase the whole PC got thrown in the caravan every couple of months and bounced across the country to some LAN party or other, to be bashed about a bit and then thrown back in the car again, so for something as sensitive as a hard disk should be it did a pretty good job surviving as long as it did.
I've just got everything set up on my new disk and I'm slowly realising quite how much I've lost.. all my photos from the last three years or so, the random useful files that one collects over time, my entire MP3 collection (getting a bit bored of the 18 I had saved onto my pendrive.. think I'll have to rip a few CDs..), various bits of schoolwork including part of a piece of physics coursework that was meant to be handed in last week.. it's all a bit frustrating really. I might try leaving the old disk for a while and then throwing it back in and trying to get a few minutes' life out of it to see if I can rescue anything...

Did you try the freezer trick?

If the drive is knackered, you've got nothing to loose...

Worth a shot, surely?

Deek.

OK, at 3pm today I ordered the Maxtor Diamondmax 10 200gb 7200rpm 8mb cache.

£65 from Dabs

I also got myself an NEC 16x RW+- Dual Layer RW +- (I think) drive... It was the only one with a silver front that I could find...

£39 from Dabs

Next Day delivery was about £9.50 or something.

On my way home tonight I bought some sound deddening (sp?) from Maplins and I've wacked it in my PC... BOY has it quietened it down!

Shuttle XPC is the case btw...

Loving it!

Now I need to find the install disks for all my essential software!

I'm going to do a fresh install instead of ghosting it as I'd planned... I think starting again will do it good.

dxg wrote:Did you try the freezer trick?

If the drive is knackered, you've got nothing to loose...

Worth a shot, surely?

Deek.

I'll give it a go.. I'll rest it for a while and try it normally first though, sometimes these things do randomly start working for a while, but if all else fails I'll stick it in the freezer and give that a go

Josh_PoloGTi wrote:OK, at 3pm today I ordered the Maxtor Diamondmax 10 200gb 7200rpm 8mb cache.

£65 from Dabs

I also got myself an NEC 16x RW+- Dual Layer RW +- (I think) drive... It was the only one with a silver front that I could find...

£39 from Dabs

Next Day delivery was about £9.50 or something.

On my way home tonight I bought some sound deddening (sp?) from Maplins and I've wacked it in my PC... BOY has it quietened it down!

Shuttle XPC is the case btw...

Loving it!

Now I need to find the install disks for all my essential software!

I'm going to do a fresh install instead of ghosting it as I'd planned... I think starting again will do it good.

You do know that there's a silent power supply available for those?

I'd love one! Esp. the newer "AV" ones with vfd displays on the front behind smoked perspex (e.g. http://global.shuttle.com/Product/Barebone/SB83G5C.asp). They come with a remote control and a bios that can play dvds etc. without booting the full os. Nice. But funds are sadly lacking atm.

Deek.

Well, here's my solution to my storage problems (lack of space):


2 x 200gb SATA drives + RAID card + gubbins = 200gb mirrored storage.

Should be good. At least this way, if a drive fails I won't loose anything. Now I just need the time to put it all together (and build the fileserver to put it in...)

I should point out that this is for work -- I don't have 200gbs of mp3s (only 14!).

Deek.

WoooHooo

I'm posting this from an "In-Progress" fresh install of my O/S onto the new drive which arrived today!

Very jerky scrolling due to me not yet having the Nvidia display drivers, and slow as hell network because I haven't installed support for USB2 yet, so my USB2 54mbps WiFi Dongle thingy is running at USB1 Speeds

I'm getting there though!

and you still thought to come on here and tell us

you do have anti-spyware and antivirus installed already, before you onlined, right?

BTW ---- Dual Layer AND +/- dual format DVD burner for under £40? Do you have a Dabs Quicklink code for that?

soooo need to get a low-noise power supply... maybe some acoustic matting, i dunno. putting the low noise CPU fan on made such a difference..... now everything else seems loud instead