I am looking to install 2nd Hard Drive. I have a p5p800 Asus motherboard. Does anyone recommend a particular Hard Drive? I am looking at no more than $150 as it is for storage only. I only need about 150-200GB.

tried the usual suspects? (umart, msy, ca)
harddrives are harddrives, all brands fail, they are much of a muchness

From the motherboard specs it seems you have two SATA ports. If you happen to have one free, I'd recommend:

Seagate SATAII NCQ 320GB 7200RPM 16mb Cache

It's about $95-105 at MSY and Umart. Not sure whether your motherboard supports SATA I or II, so keep the SATA-mode jumper enabled on the hdd to keep it in SATA I mode just incase.

There's not much point seeking a smaller hard-drive as you wouldn't be saving much money anyway.

last edited by parabol at 10:14:30 26/Sep/07

Cheers

I wouldn't recommend getting a Seagate right now. Both MSY and Umart are stocking the ones with AAK firmware. When running with Windows they perform quite slowly. There is a big thread over at Whirlpool about it at the moment.

http://www.fluffles.net/articles/seagate-AAK-firmware
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/07/08/28/2031234.shtml

Anyway, I got 1 and I can confirm that it is noticeably slower than my previous Seagate drive. Contacted Seagate and they basically told me that I should shut up and live with it and there is no way to change the firmware. I sold it on eBay and went with a Samsung instead. Now much happier.

i just bought a Lacie 500gig external HD for 99 euro is f***in awesome so far

there are ways to update harddrive firmware, a newer version might not exist yet though.

i did it on a couple of old 40gig seagates to set them up to work in raid0 properly

also, reading that second link the AAK fails artificial tests pretty bad, but does fine otherwise. sounds completely overblown to me.

what ever size you get make sure if the best value per gig

When running with Windows they perform quite slowly

I wouldn't worry about much if it's just used for storage, as is the case here.

well if he's storing large files or lots of little files and wants to access them frequently in something like a streaming media server then speed may be important.

^ You don't need much transfer speed for streaming. You can easily play a 1280x720 resolution xvid over a slow Wi-Fi connection without skipping.

But anyway, whatever.