Is this hard drive suitable and reliable?

madmum33

After my disastrous experience with the Seagate hard drive I looked for a Samsung Spinpoint as recommended in my previous thread.

This looks a good deal, has good reviews too, so will it be suitable for my computer?

I have a Dell Inspiron 530 in original setup apart from adding 2gb extra RAM taking it to 3gb.

Thanks,

Ruth

Toxteth_OGrady

I have 6 of those. Great drives.

cit_k

Most modern hard drives are reliable these days, but only as reliable as your backup regime...

fwor

I have 4 of them. They are quiet and cool running compared to the WD 500GB drives that I had previously (one of which failed without warning).

I won't say anything about reliability, as none are more than a year old, and I don't want to tempt fate...

madmum33

Thanks guys, I forgot to mention I'm still running XP, are there any issues I might come across that might prevent the drive working properly? Will I need special drivers, and should I partition the drive into smaller sections?

Hammyman

No need to partition and the OS should see the drive fine although to avoid HDD controller hell during install you want to set the SATA mode to "Compatible" or "IDE".

Toxteth_OGrady

Are you using this as a second storage drive in addition to your existing operating system drive?

madmum33

Toxteth_OGrady wrote: »

Are you using this as a second storage drive in addition to your existing operating system drive?

Yes, my original drive will still have the OS.

Toxteth_OGrady

In which case as Hammy already said - no need to partition it and your existing SATA controller will already have the drivers installed for your OS drive (assuming your existing drive is SATA, which from your spec I believe it is and your motherboard only has one SATA controller with multiple ports).

madmum33

Thank you! I was nervous after the Seagate disaster, now I will go ahead with the upgrade!

andy2004

for an extra £10 you can get a 2tb hard drive from novatech.
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/components/harddrives-internal/sataover1tb/samsung/hd204ui.html
i've got one of them, small note they need a firmware patch if used as a boot drive something about data lose, you can get the update firmware from samsungs website.
i've got mine external as such didnt need to patch it, but i did patch it incase i wanted it internally. no problems with it yet (touch wood). as its external i dont hear a pip out of it when its turned on.

more here about the fireware update and why http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks
and here http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/faqView.do?b2b_bbs_msg_id=386 for the actual update.