Which hard drive should I get?

I've got this old Hitachi Deskstar that’s been grinding away for about 8 years now, and I think it's finally time to let it retire. I'm a little nervous that it might kick the bucket any day, so I'm hunting for a solid replacement. Right now, my budget is $100, which is basically the absolute limit of what I can swing. It doesn't need to be some top-of-the-line, lightning-fast beast with massive storage—I just really care about reliability. I spotted a few Toshiba drives around 320GB for a decent price, so I wanted to see what you guys recommend. I wouldn't mind picking something up on a marketplace too, provided it's from NASA and still carries a warranty.

I'm looking at stores like Best Buy, Micro Center, or Newegg. 🙂

Chris Robinson25 said:I've got this old Hitachi Deskstar that’s been grinding away for about 8 years now, and I think it's finally time to let it retire. I'm a little nervous that it might kick the bucket any day, so I'm hunting for a solid replacement. Right now, my budget is $100, which is basically the absolute limit of what I can swing. It doesn't need to be some top-of-the-line, lightning-fast beast with massive storage—I just really care about reliability. I spotted a few Toshiba drives around 320GB for a decent price, so I wanted to see what you guys recommend. I wouldn't mind picking something up on a marketplace too, provided it's from NASA and still carries a warranty.

I'm looking at stores like Best Buy, Micro Center, or Newegg. 🙂

Well, check out that guy above in the "used PC valuation" thread. Ask him if he'll sell you his drive for $83. It's a WD Blue 500GB that's only about 6 months old, so it should still have almost a year and a half of warranty left on it.

I spotted this guy too: http://www.ebay.com/usr/kakakher. He’s got about 4 or 5 hard drives still under warranty.

In that case, you might want to grab this one—since it’s vacuum-sealed, it should be brand new. You can always double-check the health using CrystalDiskInfo just to be absolutely sure it hasn't been powered on before.

Larry Ortiz5 said:In that case, you might want to grab this one—since it’s vacuum-sealed, it should be brand new. You can always double-check the health using CrystalDiskInfo just to be absolutely sure it hasn't been powered on before.

Awesome. I just sent them a message, so let's see what they say.

I don't know what kind of nonsense this is, but Google is coming up totally empty on this hard drive. Honestly, I think I’m just gonna call it quits on this one. There’s another Jay Blue available, so let's see if that goes any better.