Need some advice on hd upgrade.

[Casper312]

So pretty much my 250gb hd is looking like its gonna be too small for my gaming needs, i currrently have installed all my games (around 19, Everything from Original Call of duty to Dead Space) and im around 90gb of space left. This is an old ide drive, which is making me wonder if i should upgrade to a newer, bigger sata drive.

So pretty much, What are some good 500gbish Drives, Im also guessing that the higher the cache the faster? Meaning the drive i should go for should be 32mb cache, 7200rpm?

Also if i upgrade, i heard some people say about a program called ghost? that xfers over data from a used drive to a newer drive to save from formatting? Can anyone give an exact name?

thanks for any help

 

[silent-circuit]

Norton / Symantec Ghost - http://www.symantec.com/themes/ghost/index.jsp
Acronis also makes a drive imaging / transfer app.

I'd personally keep your current drive and just add another, not worry about moving things over from it. The only reason to bother with all that would be if you really want to reduce boot times, as a new drive will be a few seconds faster to get in to Windows.

I'd strongly recommend the Western Digital AAKS6400 640GB 7200RPM drive. It runs around $75 and is very fast.

 

[Casper312]

boot times arent a problem, i turn on the comp and go to the rest room or get a drink and its up and running when i get back, hehe

thanks for posting the program, but yea, i have around 90gb space left, and one of buddies said that the more space the hd has used up the slower it gets, but then again hes kinda dumb, so im not gonna go 100% on that.

I was actually looking at this to go with my new cpu cooler (xigmatek s1283).

Ived had wd hds since i started building comps and no problems with em, anything wrong i should know about seagate? from the reviews their return policy is quite nice.

 

[silent-circuit]

The WD here http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136218 for $5 more is bigger and /substantially/ faster as it has greater platter density. It uses 2x320GB platters vs. 2x250GB platters in the Seagate, and more GB in the same surface area means more throughput at the same RPM all things being equal, and it works in practice. Seagate is fine and their warranty is a bit better, but they tend to be a little louder and a little slower than WD drives. I own both, and I'm not really biased either way. More cache doesn't always mean a faster drive.

As for running out of space, so long as you keep things defragmented and don't go below 15% free space (so keep ~40GB free, or a little less) you'll be fine. The 15% thing is just so there's enough room for the defragmentation program to move things around and get them in order. Drives do not slow down as they fill up, assuming you keep them properly defragmented.