Harddrive

[manisare]

I am planning to get a new hard drive for my computer because my current one is really old and probably sucks its about like 6 years old. It only can store like 50 gb which is totally gay! My computer specs are amd athlon 3500+ 2.2ghz, 1gb of ram, asrock motherboad, hiper 500 w psu, 7900gs video card. Compared to others my computer is freaking slow whether its the whole computer or maybe the hard drive.. Will getting a new hard drive help my computer's performances? Sometimes i keep getting the red flashing light alot. I am planning to get a seagate barrucada something... around 250 gb or more. What hard drives do you recommand and i need really good ones like under 100 dollars.

[Telexen]

Yes, an old HDD like that with a low amount of cache can be causing lower performance in a lot of situations.

I usually buy my HDDs when they're on sale for ridiculously low prices at Fry's Electronics. Right now I see they're advertising a 500gb drive for $110

You can probably look around there or check out SlickDeals frequently for other deals.

[Nikolai]

Hey,
The best harddrive is often the one from a respectable company that you can find at the cheapest price ... i recommend the going for a 7200 rpm harddisk because ive heard from some people that they have a much longer lifespan then 10000 rpm harddrives (and are much cheaper) .... if speed is really an issue for you then the cheapest way is always to get a second 7200 rpm HD nd go with RAID 0 becoz HD's are so cheap.
I like seagate and samsung. Im prolly more biased toward Western Digital Caviar series because thats what ill be buying.
The WD Caviar comes in all sorts of sizes but the cheapest size per gigabyte i found was the 400gb model ... other then that its Sata 2, has a 16mb cache, it has shockguard and datalife guard, plus a great warranty and runs at 7200rpm.