Page 1 of Who do we like for hard drives now?

Samsung hard drive a few years old, missus moaned that Sims was freezing now and again, I put that down to not having done an install for a couple of years now!

anyway, looked in event viewer, couple of disk messages now and again, but it`s done that before.

In Linux opened I opened a Disk Utility, which says that disk has 1 bad sector. That hard drive is only used for XP, and installed games, so I may just use till it dies, backing up save games now and again.

But I was thinking, if I do a fresh Windows XP install on it, then the OS and hard drive firmware should be clever enough to not use that bad sector shouldn`t it, until if/when more bad sectors turn up?

Saying that, it would be a pain in the arse to install Xp again, and Sims 3 + all add ons, for hard drive to then die and have to do it all over again.

While I`m here, I think XP is still best OS to use for this PC, AMD X2 3800 3GB RAM, nvidia 8800GTS 512 graphics card. I`ve got an unused Win 7 home prem I could use, which although would be nice to get DX10 stuff, i think extra req needed for 7 would negate benefits.

current hard drive is 250gb, so I guess I could just buy a bigger one and put 7 on as well as xp.

Also, mobo is SATA II, I assume I can put a SATA III hard drive in no prob, it will just only run at SATA II speed?

Cheers

Al

This item was edited on Saturday, 23rd June 2012, 11:25

defragged and chkdsked all drives in XP, and nothing in event viewer suggesting problems, di da couple of scans using Samungs hutil from Hiren, and that showed no problems.

another forum some-one suggested http://www.hdtune.com/index.html so I downloaded that to try pro version which you can do free for 15 days, and that said 1 bad sector, reallocated,as did the 1st program of the day, so maybe Ill just back up game saves and keep an eye on it for time being.

Few things, the first of which is all HDDs have bad sectors, even new ones. But the hardware controller on board is smart enough to remap them to a bank of spare ones on the fly, so you`ll never notice.

This is related to the info you can get from SMART about drive health.

However once you get to the point where your OS is discovering bad sectors, that bank of spares is gone and your HDD is now in trouble.

I`ve never ever had one start showing bad sectors and not rapidly get worse. Definitely replace ASAP!


oh, not bought one for a while but I`d still get a Samsung I think. Not heard bad things about them and my last 2 where and are still fine.


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This item was edited on Sunday, 24th June 2012, 10:31

Quote:
Rob Shepherd says...
oh, not bought one for a while but I`d still get a Samsung I think. Not heard bad things about them and my last 2 where and are still fine.
Now owned by Seagate so only a matter of time.....

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"There`s that word again... is there a problem with the Earth`s gravitational pull in the future?"