Getting a Hard Drive

Whats all your guys opinions on Hard drives?

External or Internal, Size, Company, Price, and so on.

I need some input. Im most likely gonna get 200gb, or higher, then use RAID. Right now, I got a 160 gig.

my dad gets like £350 gig ones allt he time like $100 or so plus he usually get external ... i always have at least 600 gig on my pcs though but i have a few external so i'd say best of getting an external because i just prefer them i don't know why also they sometimes can be unreliable depends on where you buy them, try here they have some alreet ones but i'm not sure where my dad gets his from, when i find out i'll reply :)

internal>western digital>200gb>£65 thats like $90 or summat.....right

I dunno why you'd need more than 160gb... most hard drives seem alike to me, I cant really help... What's RAID?

Raid is something, that in laymens terms, uses noth hard drives, to store the same data. In case one fails, the other automatically kicks in.

Thats raid 1? I think.

I wanna use raid 0. It doubles your hard drive speed, by storing half the data on one drive then half on the other. So in theory, it doubles your HD speed. Which i would get a 3 gig per second one, then it would about double to 6 gigs per second. =)

sounds sweet... does machine think its 1 hard drive or 2?

It depends on the RAID. In raid 0 I believe it's 2 single hard drives.

In raid 1 it only recgonizes, the first hard drive. But the pc always stores the data on both the hard drives. And if the first HD fails,the pc switches to the second hard drive, in matter of seconds to minutes.

It all depends what RAID your using. There more then 1, and 0. But there for mostly for severs.

If you're looking for something to store music, movies, and random files I suggest an external hard drive. It makes file swapping with friends so much easier.

As far as brands, stick with the big names. Seagate or Western Digital mostly.

If you're going for a new HDD, I'd definitly suggest you should go for a serial ATA if your motherboard can support it. I recently bought one of these; http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/in...oduct_uid=89530 and it's unbelievably fast, and so quiet. It runs like a dream. If I could afford another one, I'd get one and raid it. I've always bought maxtor drives, and rarely had problems :)

Edit: As for size; the bigger the better! But if the choice is between large drive, low cache, and smaller drive, higher cache; if there's only a small difference, 50g or so between the sizes, go for the one with the higher cache.

And yeah, I always go for internal

Ill most likely get an internal. As I use my network to transfer files. Also I have a alot of 1 gig SD cards, so I can always use those to transfer files that I can't transfer over the network.