[the Battle Cat]

My hard drive is in the process of taking a dump on me. I've had to pick the pieces of a hard drive out of my teeth before and the hell if I'm going to let that happen to me again. I need some quick suggestions of an exact model you think is most reliable and fast. I have a Serial ATA 233Gb HD and would like to stay in that size range of 250Gb.

I figured you geeks would be the best people to ask. Up front I'll say I'm sorry for all the times I've made fun of you behind your backs and have scored with your women while you endlessly argued some minor geek point with one another. Let's just put that behind us now. Let's start fresh. No more wedgies, no more getting pantsed and shoved into the girl's lavatory. I'll stop with all the buck-toothed pocket protector jokes. I hid all of your slide rulers behind the drinking fountain on the 3rd floor by the steps across from the physics lab. Now please, just give your Battle Cat a little love.

[Eric5h5]

Pfft. As if you weren't just as much of a geek as anyone else here. Anyway, my Maxtor drives have been 100% reliable so far.

--Eric

[teflon]

If you want mega speed, then you could go for a Western Digital Raptor, 10,000RPM of speedy goodness (and it can figure out how to work door handles too).
150GB isnt all that common a HDD size these days, and its slower than everything else too because of less platters or lower density. So Id suggest going for at least 320Gb anyway.

After that its just a duck shoot between whoever says what is more reliable. I think I remember Frost recommending Seagate, Ive had a good time with my WD drive in my MBP (though thats a 2.5" drive), Eric likes Maxtor. You might as well look to see what brand that HDD is and from that and the one that failed on you before avoid those makes...

[the Battle Cat]

teflon, on June 3rd 2009, 03:27 AM, said:

If you want mega speed, then you could go for a Western Digital Raptor, 10,000RPM of speedy goodness (and it can figure out how to work door handles too).
150GB isnt all that common a HDD size these days, and its slower than everything else too because of less platters or lower density. So Id suggest going for at least 320Gb anyway.

Now this is why I asked you guys. I wouldn't know about the current state of disk sizes, I was just quoting my current disk size. 320Gb is fine. 10,000 RPM sounds like overkill.

teflon, on June 3rd 2009, 03:27 AM, said:

After that its just a duck shoot between whoever says what is more reliable. I think I remember Frost recommending Seagate, Ive had a good time with my WD drive in my MBP (though thats a 2.5" drive), Eric likes Maxtor. You might as well look to see what brand that HDD is and from that and the one that failed on you before avoid those makes...

It is a 4 year old Maxtor that is failing. It totally figures that Eric would try to sabotage my computer system. Not only is he a meanie pie, he wants me out of the way so that he can deal out jail house justice to all the forum members who picked on him, took his lunch money, or made him eat a bug. I'll go with Frost's advice, Frost is nice young man.

I'm not sure which kind of drive will fit in my G5, This is listed as a Serial-ATA in my System Profiler but I didn't notice any of those listed at MacConnection. I suppose that is listed as SATA? Will this puppy fit into my G5? 150 dollars for a 1.5Tb? Can that be right?

[Hansi]

the Battle Cat, on June 3rd 2009, 01:59 PM, said:

Will this puppy fit into my G5? 150 dollars for a 1.5Tb? Can that be right?

Yes, yes and yes.

[the Battle Cat]

Well hell. Things have changed. Does the Mac need a specialized Mac-only hard drive or can I just walk into Walmart and buy any 7 pin, 3.5" SATA hard drive for it?

[Hansi]

the Battle Cat, on June 3rd 2009, 02:20 PM, said:

Well hell. Things have changed. Does the Mac need a specialized Mac-only hard drive or can I just walk into Walmart and buy any 7 pin, 3.5" SATA hard drive for it?

Hard drives and memory have for years and will always from here on be industry standardized

[cactusjoe]

I tend to like Seagate Barracuda drives - they are whisper quiet. I usually purchase OEM's from Newegg and have had good luck with them.

[PeopleLikeFrank]

I've never had a bad experience with any hard drive, which includes Maxtor, WD, Seagate and Samsung. *Knock on wood*, I guess. But Seagate is definitely good. If you want to save a buck there are drives in the 500GB - 1TB range for under $100 most places. Going under 500GB is getting more difficult to find, and they're so cheap that I don't know why you'd bother anyway.

[the Battle Cat]

Thanks for the input guys. I'm off to Walmart tomorrow.

[Eric5h5]

lawl tbc shops at walmart lawl!!!11!!

--Eric

[the Battle Cat]

So I shop at Walmart.

[Rev-O]

Well, if you need a second one I believe I have a fairly virginal 250gb SATA Hitachi sitting in a box... somewhere...

[the Battle Cat]

Rev-O, on June 3rd 2009, 05:36 PM, said:

Well, if you need a second one I believe I have a fairly virginal 250gb SATA Hitachi sitting in a box... somewhere...

Ewwwwwwww! Not THAT kind of a hard drive!!

Thanks Rev-O, but I already did my shopping. I checked Walmart online to see if I should bother driving over there and they didn't have what I wanted so I checked out MacMall.com and found this disk at half price... so I bought two of them. One to be a backup disk. I also located Carbon Copy Clone and I'm going to clone my startup disk onto one and then continue to use CCC to schedule full backups each night. Right now I have a large internal drive and a small external drive that I do partial nightly backups to. Now I can just dump the whole thing over the second disk, plus it will be a second startup disk. I only thought to make the external a bootable drive after I had the problem starting up on the master disk.

Also, I bought a newer version of Diskwarrior, which was of no help to me during this meltdown. Version 3.0.3 kept crashing mid run and making the problem worse. TechTool pulled my fat out of the fire. But the problem keeps reoccurring intermittently, I go to reboot and get the flashing question mark asking where my boot up disk is. No more rebooting for me until I have a replacement drive.

[teflon]

I dont know if you know this, but you dont need to do full backups with CCC, you can do incremental ones which only copy across any new and modified files. Much better than the full backups in terms of time (think 5 minutes instead of a couple of hours), and its just as good basically.

[the Battle Cat]

teflon, on June 4th 2009, 07:38 AM, said:

I dont know if you know this, but you dont need to do full backups with CCC, you can do incremental ones which only copy across any new and modified files. Much better than the full backups in terms of time (think 5 minutes instead of a couple of hours), and its just as good basically.

Yes. Let me define my terms here. The backups I intend to do with CCC are incremental nightly backups of the files that have changed during the day. By "full backups" I mean the incremental backup will address the entire hard drive, not just the few selected user files I was able to backup on the smaller hard drive. My backup hard drive will now mirror my startup drive. First I'm going to clone the startup drive, and then I'm going to schedule the nightly incremental backups.

I was using SilverKeeper, a backup utility that was bundled with my external drive. CCC appears to be a much more useful utility.

[teflon]

just checking. And yeah, CCC is spot on for almost every backup clone needs.

[the Battle Cat]

You are where I first heard about CCC. Thanks for the heads up.

[iEvan]

Looks like I'm late coming to the discussion so I won't comment on drive selection other than you'll be pleased to know that the drive you purchased has a five year warranty on it (which is pretty darn good). If you are still having issues with repairing/retrieving data your original drive, let me know. Diskwarrior is best for file system gum-ups, but if the drive itself if failing mechanically, it won't do a thing. If it is indeed a hardware issue and you need your data, you will have to use something like Data Rescue II from ProSoft. I give top marks to both CCC and SuperDuper! and use them both at work for drive clones.

[the Battle Cat]

Thanks iEvan. So far so good. I've managed to back the data up to my external drive. I have my fingers crossed that the internal drive will hold out long enough for the new drives to be installed.