Hi guys,

My primary hard drive has failed for some reason. I upgraded to Vista 64 a few months ago and was trying to reformat the computer. Wheen I put the Vista upgrade cd in I removed the partitions but it wouldn't install over the existing Vista. So I had to restore the factory software first with XP so I ran the Advent System Recovery software. However when it gets to around 30-40% the system restore software says it is unable to create a user partition. I've goneback and restarted the computer, pressed F10 and done the Ctrl + Backspace thing to remove and create a new partition but this still doesn't seme to work.

So...I've decided to replace the hard drive but I don't know whether to get a 500gb 7200rpm one from PC World (around £80) or whether its worth replacing it with a Raptor 150gb 10000rpm one (£115). Is there going to be much difference running the operating system and programs from the faster hard drive? I have two secondary drives in a stripe I save all my work onto as well as music and videos. Was contemplating replacing these two at the same time as well but am not sure whether it's worth replacing these with two Raptors at the same time?

Another thing to note is that the computer origionally came with just one hard drive. The power supply is 500watts and it's coped well with two more hard drives but is it worth upgrading this? I was thinking of changing it in a few months along with the graphics cards but not right now. And how do you work out how much power you need?

The spec of my computer is:

Advent GX9000, Intel Pentium D 2.4Ghz, 4Gb RAM, 1x 300Gb HDD (failed), 2x 200Gb HDD (striped), 2x Nvidia 6600 256mb graphics.

Any thoughts would be appreciated

I read on Tomshardware a few months back that the Raptor drives dont like Vista too well.

If it was me, I'd go for the 500Gb drive - space is more valuable to me than the performance difference which I'd probably never even notice I recently bought a new 320Gb disc for £43 at Computer Supplies from Novatech so may be worth checking out before committing to Novatech...

On the PSU front, 500W should be fine imvho.

Chris

On the PSU front, 500W should be fine imvho.

Chris

Agree. Well it better had be as I've got to build my mates PC up for him when he gets the parts. Will be nice to see 2x8800GT's in action

Theirs now 32mb caches drives out now. I buy my stuff from ebuyer, overclockers and scan.

Theirs now 32mb caches drives out now. I buy my stuff from ebuyer, overclockers and scan.

But that's a bit like saying you can now buy cars with 1000bhp. Great for pub talk and benchmarking software, but in the real world, I'm not sure you'd notice a huge amount, if any difference, for the additional cost ... all imvho

Chris

for the additional cost ... all imvho

Chris

Also agree. Been trying to tell a friend he'll notice jack **** difference between a £60 motherboard and a £200 one.

Check out the reviews... the latest high capacity (and therefore data density) drives are fast approaching the raptors for out and out speed... the latest 750gb samsungs are now the fastest drives available.

Raptors are not that fast for data throughput they just have a low latency.

Hi guys thanks for all your replies. Am going to go to PC World and see what hard drives are in stock. its either a 500gb Samsung with 16mb buffer or a 1tb toshiba with 32mb buffer. The vista/raptor issue put me off, plus if the performance cannot be utilised then a trade-off in space is not worth it

It may not be the drive, Vista can be a pain, and the advent recovery process can also be iffy depending on what state the drive was in before starting.

I would put your supposedly broken drive in another machine as slave, and then use XP/Vista disk management to make sure the drive is clear and try installing again.

Hmm ok now I'm kicking myself lol. I just bought a 750Gb Hitachi drive with 32Mb buffer and stuck it into the computer. I booted the computer up and tried the Advent System Recovery. Yet again it failed to create a user partition. So I disconnected the two other hard drives that I was using in a stripe and now the partition is being created as we speak. Maybe the origional hard drive was ok....but after using the Packard Bell disc checker thing (not sure what it was called), it found a faulty sector on it so maybe it was on its way out soon?

its quiet common for hard drives to have faulty sectors. normally what happens is once detected is they are mapped to another part of the hard disk thats reserved for this purpose and the faulty sector is marked as bad. The PB utililty scans the whole drive and will re-detect these sectors. No hard drive is perfect and virtually all have dodgy sectors. If you had scanned your brand new drive, chances are it to will have bad sectors.

Good point mannyo. Might hook up the 400Gb drive to an external hard drive case thingy lol. The problem is I already have somany hard drives as it is.

The primary hard drive is now 750gb. There's a 4Gb partition for something, then a 50gb partition for Vista, and then I've created a 650 gb partition for software I'm going to install.

The striped hard drive is 2x 200gb drives and thats going to store all my documents and media.

Then I have an external 750gb drive for backing up the computer onto.

Don't think I'd need another 400gb, or have the space for it!

If you get rid of the hard drive on ebay or something make sure you run wipe over it in the multi pass random data option.

That should be enough to stop most people after data getting anything you had on there.

The hard disk manufacturers all produce their own health check software (i.e. Maxblast for Maxtor) so it's worth running the HD through the tests on that software. It'll normally create an RMA code for you too if it's under warranty.

Raptors are noisy and hot. Probably don't produce much of a benefit over a couple of decent normal drives. A couple of cheaper drives set up as Raid 1 would probably be beat a single Raptor.