TR Forums

Its time to upgrade to Vista 64 for me and I am doing a number of other upgrades to make sure I get the most out of it. One of those upgrades is getting a new main hard drive. From what I've been reading here and in other places WD makes a good, fast drive in the Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS (though I just saw a post of trouble with it) which currently sells for around $80. Is this good for my main boot drive or do I need something bigger with Vista. Also are there any others that might be faster for around that price...no more than $100 or so? Also I don't do any video encoding or anything like that just play games and use for regular everyday programs so do I really need a secondary data drive?

Thanks in advance for the responses.

The 640 gig WD Drive is an extremely good value for your needs. To get anything cheaper, you would be sacrificing a lot of storage space.

This drive should be able to handle anything you throw at it.

I actually have two of these drives and I use one as an external backup drive.

Another vote for that same drive.

And another. I have one as my main drive now, with a second on the way this week for back up.

You can't go wrong with a five year warranty and great performance.

Thanks...I ordered it...should be here in three days...appreciate the quick responses

I voted with my wallet. Bought that drive last week for my new OS drive.

i got to get me one of those

and yup, nothing but good reviews about that particular drive...was thinking of the same exact one when i saw the topic

can't go wrong with the 640

I would suggest WD's another 640G drive, the blue label one, WD Caviar SE 16 (WD6400AAKS). It has better balance in regarding to performance, energy saving and silence.

duck apple wrote:

I would suggest WD's another 640G drive, the blue label one, WD Caviar SE 16 (WD6400AAKS). It has better balance in regarding to performance, energy saving and silence.

The 640GB Black is the same 2-platter setup and should be very similar in noise and energy consumption characteristics. On newegg these days it is only $5 more and even just for the longer warranty alone (forget a very slight performance advantage), IMO it is worth it. Now if the difference is $10 or more (in my case it was about $10 Canadian), you will need to think about it a bit more.

The drive arrived and I followed the instructions in the guide stickied here. When I went to format the drive the capacity is only 596.17 GB. Am I missing something...is this right....its formatting right now in NTFS format but wasn't sure if I did something wrong and lost 40 gig! Anyone know what these are supposed to format to in terms of gigs?

Hard drive capacities are rated by GB, ie. 10^9 bytes. Windows labels drive capacities using the binary gigabyte (Gibibyte) which is 2^30 (1 073 741 824) bytes. Formatted capacity will also be slightly lower than the drives actual size due to file system overhead.

The difference due to the units is actually about 47GB (using base 10 notation), but since Windows is reporting it in base 2 units it will look more like 44GiB

Ok drive is formated...now I want to make a full copy of my old drive into the new one so I can then remove my original drive and leave the new one as the main boot up drive....what is the best way to copy the whole drive into the new one? Should I do this in DOS instead of Windows? Should I use a utility?

I have Windows Vista 64 but its an upgrade CD so I can't install it into the new drive without putting the old OS on it first and performing an upgrade.

mveleza wrote:

Ok drive is formated...now I want to make a full copy of my old drive into the new one so I can then remove my original drive and leave the new one as the main boot up drive....what is the best way to copy the whole drive into the new one? Should I do this in DOS instead of Windows? Should I use a utility?

I've used WD's DataLifeguard utility for that in the past, though obviously there are plenty of other solutions. (You might as well also pick up the diagnostic utility while you're there)

I dont quite remember but I think there is a program called macrium that is free

In my opinion, a huge main drive is not the way to go
your storage drives need to be big, but the main drive should be smaller
doesnt really matter, just my preference for moving stuff around

640GB isn't huge anymore. Even when it's 80% empty.

Yes, but the point is
I bet he does have a bunch of music and videos that would be much easier to move around on a 2nd hard drive.
Storing all your data on one hard drive, especially the one with windows, is not a good idea in my opinion.

So to mveleza
if you still have your current drive and it is around 300GB I would use that as your main and purchase this WD 640 as a secondary and make 2 partitions on it, if your current drive is less than 250GB I would not use it as main again
also, don't store your media files on the main drive and you will have enough space for all your applications till you are ready to buy a new computer once you have 2 hard drives installed
if you ever do get a new computer, pull out your 2nd drive and plug it in your new computer and you are ready to go

potatochobit wrote:

... make 2 partitions on it,...

Mind if I ask what your reasoning is on this? I'm just curious what different people do.

I'd say do what was suggested by others and clone your existing drive to it and then expand that partition to use the whole disk. Then you have a disk you can use for another computer, or, better yet, use as an external backup.

no real reason, it makes it easier to organize and looks nice
I like to keep video files separate from work stuff
I also install my video games all in the same partition if not on the main drive
it's easier to defragment and clean up partitions you use a lot and no need to touch ones you dont
also, if multiple people use the computer they would have their 'own' hard drive if u gave them a partition

I have one hard drive (320GB, but that's as big as a 7200 rpm laptop drive gets).

I have a 25 GB partition with the OS installed on it, a 160 GB partition with media on it (Documents, music, videos, the TR podcast =D), and the rest is blank right now but it's mostly for Linux experiments and the like. Probably, I'll resize the OS partition soon to about 60 GB.

The middle partition would be bigger, but my external drive is 160GB so I figure it's best to leave the partition small enough to back up.

I cloned the drive and installed the new OS on it...just waiting on an RMA video card that will be here on Tuesday to finalize the setup. I eventually want to get another one of these drives for storage but can't afford right now. The old drive went into my wife's computer as the boot drive. In hindsite I think I should have created two partitions and put the new OS on one and kept the Win XP on the other. I might still be able to do it later...if I create a second partition and clone the drive to the new partition again...can I boot from it? This would give me Vista 64 on one and Win xp 32 on the other. As it stands when windows loads it asks if I want to load from the Old Version of Windows but then I say Yes it complains of missing files and fails to load.

BTW thanks for all the feedback...I like my new drive and think its a great value for the price