Been there, done that.

We've now got 1.280 tb on a RAID 5 redundant storage array in our network, which means any 1 hard drive out of the 4 can fail and it'll all still work. If 2 fail you're toast, though, which can very well happen due to physical outside sources, such as power failure for example.

At least you managed to get stuff off it - you're very lucky.

At the first sign of weird clunky noises you should have started to prepare for a HD death, most of the time you get no warning at all.

 

I'm still using 2 130GB hd myself, or something like that. I'm pretty ruthless about deleting 'leftover' files after working on a project and burning files to my 4 or 8GB DVD's, tho.

Most people have no need for tb's of HD space for one pc, tho admittedly it would be handy at times. :D I think we were looking at the 500GB HD's last night, in fact, lol. Hubby wants to set up a lot of partitions and run different O/S on the same pc, that sort of stuff. heh

 

Just a comment about the hard drive you bought and my new opinion of Fry's Electronics. I used to be extremely jealous of not living anywhere near Fry's, since Blizzard tends to do all sorts of goodie events there, but no longer; judging from the price you paid for your 160 gig hard drive, you got ripped, bad. Or I got a spectacular deal--but just a month ago I bought a 300gig Maxtor drive with 7200 RPM and a 16MB cache for 94 USD--and that was the flat Tigerdirect.com rate; no rebates to screw around with or anything. I'm also equipped with a 3 year warranty on the thing from the manufacturer. With that nice cache and spindle speed, the drive actually runs faster as an external through a USB port than my current internal--an ancient, Gateway brand 20 gig piece of crap--now holding Windows XP and not much else. (I'd turn my Maxtor into the primary, but I need to haul it back and forth from home to the computer labs on campus to transfer big digital photos around.)

Anywho, I wouldn't say you got completely shredded on the deal--Hitachi is an exceptional brand, and if it fails, you can probably drive right back to Fry's and get a new one--if mine screws up, I'm stuck with digging out old sales receipts and hoping there's not some stupid "warranty only applies if" clause.

Bottom line though; if Fry's charges that much for most of their computer hardware, then something's not right in Dodgeville. Or, like I postulated before, I might have just been lucky and got a special sale. More likely, I have no knowledge of hard drives at all and I probably bought something with the Maxtor name on it and third party parts, much like they do with video cards.

Great job getting the files off it though--glad you could do that.

 

Hmm, $89 for a 160 gig / 7200 RPM HD isn't that good, actually.

At first look I thought it was good, but in NZ $'s that's about $140, and I can get them for $106.81 for the same Hitachi drive.

There are 3, potentially 4 factors in play here for the price difference that you've found, nick:
1. The $94 you paid is probably only for the drive itself, nothing more. The $89 Flux payed is probably the 'retail box' price, where it comes in a nicely printed big box with cables and stuff in it. Funny thing is, you can't even really get hard drives like that in NZ, everything here is just the drive all by itself.
2. Tigerdirect and other online places typically have lower prices than brick 'n' mortar retailers, for rather obvious reasons.
3. Maxtor isn't actually a very good brand, and the 3 year warranty vs 5 year warranty is a big deal on hard drives, as they are the most failure-prone component of a computer. Maxtor were recently bought out by Seagate, who have decided to keep the brand name, but relegate it to the cheap 'value' product range - always something to steer-clear of if you want a computer that is going to work without hassles, and there isn't much less of a hassle than your hard drive dying.
4. You may have easily got that on a special deal, they have them quite frequently.

A while ago Costco were selling 400gig 16mb cache retail Western Digital hard drives for $99, but only in select stores and only if you went into the shop, they weren't taking online orders for them.


The difference between Fry's and Tigerdirect, of course, is that you can just drive down to Fry's, 20 mins from your house, pick something up and have it installed half an hour later. Beats waiting a couple of days for a part that you desperately need.

 

As lanth says, I had to have it asap, with a big project due Saturday. (And a bigger one monday, unfortunately.) So no time to shop around, and they had no sales going, and I wanted one with good quality and a warranty (mostly since those are less likely to break). They had no name stuff for a lot cheaper, and I could have gone larger for much less per gig, but I don't need that much space and this is a very old computer anyway.

Most likely I'll get a decent 3d card and put some more RAM on it once HGL comes out, and Malaya can use this one to play (no Mac for HGL), and i'll get a new computer or maybe laptop for my needs/HGL fun next year.

 

Uh-oh. Looks like I ended up with a sort of budget hard drive. And you're right; the drive didn't come in a retail box or anything; just packaged in plastic and a box of peanuts--oddly enough, the cables came with the enclosure I bought for it.

Well, I saved some money, but it might screw me over in the longrun; lets hope this sucker lasts a decent amount of time.

On a side note, I will now be going totally brand name (and do some more research) if and when I pick up a new video card. My GForceFX 5200 with 128 RAM is really showing its age. Half Life 2 on 640x480 resolution with all detail off, anyone? Okay, I can have some of the details on medium, but in an FPS game, speed is everything.