Hard-drive advice please

Mr_Tinkles

Hey Guys,

Hope one of you can help me out. I've owned a Dell XPS420 for just shy of 2 years ago after buying it on recommendation from here and other sites. Over the time i've had real problems with the computer restarting or freezing. I've done a lot of googling on it to try and establish what is wrong and with my copy of Windows 7 arriving towards the end of the month i want to sort out the problems with my PC before i get it. All the results that i got were suggesting that it was the hard-drives that are at fault. I've backed up all my important files on external drives and so i was looking to replace the hard drives but i'm not sure what i should be getting.

The computer currently has 2x320gb Samsung Hard-drives (according to the original spec they are 7200rpm) in Raid 0 Stripe. I am looking to replace with either 1TB hard drive or 2x 500gb hard drives.

Does anyone have any suggestions of what would be best to get? I do have a little techie knowledge but as the saying goes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and i don't want to screw up my pc.

John_Gray

RAID-0 means that the two 320 GB drives are logically connected together so that you effectively have a single ~640 GB drive. So if either drive fails you lose everything...

Are you sure you don't mean RAID-1, mirrored, where both drives have the same data at the same time, but you only have ~320 GB of disk space in total?

The problem is whether or not you want to keep whatever level of RAID you have - and you'd need two drives to do that (must be the same size, and preferably the same manufacturer and model). But unless you have some good documentation about how to set up RAID on new disks on that Dell, I would be a bit wary...

Also converting from RAID with two drives to non-RAID with one drive might be a challenging exercise...

Mr_Tinkles

Thanks for your response. It definitely is Raid 0 according to my PC and i tracked down the original PC Spec from HKUD and it comes up as being 640GB Dual Hard Drive Raid 0 Stripe (2x320GB - 7200rpm).

I definitely don't want to put any new hard drive i buy in to raid. I was thinking of either a 1TB single drive or 2 x 500gb with one running windows and the other as an auxillary drive. Just not sure what to get.

closed

Restarting and freezing could be loads of things, what leads you to the hard drive conclusion?

Mr_Tinkles

Hi i guess nothing scientific, just googling to see what could be at fault and the majority of results seem to suggest that it most likely the hard drive.

What are the other things it could be?

closed

software, virus, drivers, overheating, ram, motherboard, graphics card, something to do with raid, just about anything really.

Faulty hard drive would be very low down on probability normally, unless you have other symptoms, run chkdsk on the disks.

AHAR

It wouldn't do any harm to visit the Dell support site and see which driver updates are available for your system, especially any labelled Recommended or Urgent.

Edit: I see there's an urgent one listed for Samsung hard drives...