I upgraded my HDD from a 500gb( very loud, corrupted a huge chunk of my project a few days ago ) 7200 to a 2tb 5900.
So far everything works great, and while i’m still doing daily backups on a 8GB flash drive , I no longer feel like my computer is constantly on the verge of death!
I think this is a 1 in 100 problem, most people have bigger issues then a crap HDD.
I disagree, over the last decade I’ve had 5 separate hard-drive failures across multiple Win/Mac systems, its been the single biggest hardware failing issue I’ve had to deal with. Its also amazing how many people completely ignore HDD issues until its too late and then act all surprised to find they’ve lost all their precious content because they failed to make basic back ups…
I’d say that a bad HDD is one of the worst issues you have have, since you’ll lose all your work if it dies
Yeah man! I had the same issue. I upgraded to a new basic 750gb from a 320gb and the performance increase was astonishing. I never realised that my HD (3 years old) was the biggest bottleneck of my PC.
The reason I didn’t go higher in gb is because I’m saving my pennies for 2 SSD’s. One for windows only and the other one for data. I saw how quick they work on a mates PC and damn these SSD drives blink.
Hmm is there any possible thing to do to tell if my hdd is making my computer crap?
If you HDD is very loud, if it keeps running Chkdsk every othey boot .
The tools that analyze HDD’s don’t help all that much .
Ohh, and if your losing data .
You do daily backups to a flash drive? Why don’t you use a source control repository like butbucket.org? Its free under 5 users, and not only do you only update what’s updated, you also have an off-location backup.
What happens if your house burns down? And you left your flash stick at home? Boom there goes your work.
I do backups to a flash drive, a bitbucket repository and my own dedicated server sitting in a remote data center.
I’ve been behind this idea for a while now. I move to a new HDD about once a year, the performance improvement is often remarkable.
Moved to an SSD recently. Now THAT’S a performance increase.
Shame it has relatively little space ( 160gb)
Thanks for the tip, but what about security, ( already got it, zip, and password lock it, and pray no one really wants to get in)
If my house burns down I have other problems …
THIS is something I can stand behind, my last HDD makes so much noise its time to send it in under warranty.
Get an SSD. 
Or 3 in a RAID5. Mmmmmm. I miss my home computer at work. 
P.S. It should be criminal to rate mechanical hard drives the way they do. 100,000 hours MTBF my ass.
HD can make a difference but in my experience the fresh install with an unfragmented drive (even if it’s just a reformat of the old one) can make an insane difference.
SDD’s are still to expensive IMO- maybe in about 4 years .
Note to self, a lower spining drive is actually good in a multihard drive machine( less heat FTW)
the hard drive has 2 ‘branches’ of issues
-speed bottleneck
-failure/data loss that may or may not lead to a half working condition with a speed bottleneck
assuming mechanical drives, if it’s not failing or you’re buying a new drive, you should be using one with the least amount of platters (for lower heat/strain) the most density per platter
so for example, a 1TB drive with 4 250gb platters could in fact end up as slow as a 250gb drive with 1 platter
or a denser 5900rpm ‘green’ drive will have faster sequential read/write speeds than a less dense 7200rpm drive
then there are the OS/mobo bios options like AHCI which will enable useful features (that come on sata drives from the last 5yrs) like NCQ, which i can personally confirm that has made the bookmarks manager of firefox many times faster than in IDE mode
Its not all about speed, faster drives die faster
In a cupple of years SSD is going to be the thing, i actualy think that it is cheaper to make a SSD then a HDD(if you had the same amount of manafacturing going on) i think its only because there are so many HDD making machines out there that buying SSD manufactuing machinery is a bad idea… i also think its the same with OLED and LCD.
LOLWhat?