Buying a used hard drive?

A

Alexis18

New Member
Hi, I'm going to give my old PC to my father. I'm removing my hard drive (4 years old) and destroying it.

I am going to by a used hard drive for him..


How big of a hard drive should I buy? He is going to use the computer to.. download music/movies, surf the web, documents/photos etc.. NO HEAVY gaming or anything...

The lasy suggested a 40, is that good?
 
Alexis18 said:
Hi, I'm going to give my old PC to my father. I'm removing my hard drive (4 years old) and destroying it.

I am going to by a used hard drive for him..


How big of a hard drive should I buy? He is going to use the computer to.. download music/movies, surf the web, documents/photos etc.. NO HEAVY gaming or anything...

The lasy suggested a 40, is that good?
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If he is going to be downloading a bunch of movies and music then anything over 100 Gig is good enough. I recorded the whole season 5 of 24 and it took up like 60GB and that was on low quality so anything over hundred should be fine.
 
Before having a sudden connection failure I was going to make a suggestion similar to what holyjunk125 is referring to. Having spent the last few years working with video capturing/editing, music recording from old 12" vinyl and cassette tape to be later be burned on cd-rs as well as creating both dvd and vcd projects I often find even a 250gb cramped at times. But for the average user who wants to download a large volume of files along with downloading large files like quality video you definitely need capacity.
In fact you may even want to consider having a second drive if not cd/dvd writer added to the system for more permanent storage of things like freewares, updates, and other things in the even of any virus, spyware, adware type infections of the primary where it has to be wiped clean or hardware failure. I just spotted one vendor's $75- price on a WD 2500JB bare bones drive that would go right in and be reliable. You can look at that model at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144309 as well as a 300gb and 320gb model also available along with the 2500JS at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...06&Submit=ENE&Manufactory=1306&SubCategory=14
 
PC eye said:
Having spent the last few years working with video capturing/editing, music recording from old 12" vinyl and cassette tape to be later be burned on cd-rs as well as creating both dvd and vcd projects I often find even a 250gb cramped at times.
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Oh? :D Ever been here?: http://audiokarma.org
Tom
 
bad idea to buy used hard drive there may have been a virus left on there i had obne on my old hard drive and even when we wiped it clean it was still there and couldnt be removed so we bough ta new one
 
a virus will generally be found right away if he buys a used harddrive and alot of the time there are warranties.. I say its better to get it usedd for the money you save. But 40gigs for moveis isnt gonna be enough. the average downlaoded movies in avi format is about 750mb... it adds up. and if he downloads a movie ready to burn, those files are generally about 4 gigs. i nsay go no smaller than an 80.
 
AMD gs player said:
bad idea to buy used hard drive there may have been a virus left on there i had obne on my old hard drive and even when we wiped it clean it was still there and couldnt be removed so we bough ta new one
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You could have always Reformated it. That would have worked.
 
If you want to nsure that any "leftovers?" are removed from any drive bought or even borrowed you would use a "zero fill" type program that writes nothing but zero data to the entire drive. That does take a lot of time depending on the size and drive speed as well. Having worked with 13gb MPEG II files as well as storing tons of downloads like various beta programs being tried out along with various utilities for different OSs getting a 160gb or larger drive allows for the creation of a good sized storage partition with a good 60-80gb primary to allow for a good number of programs to run as well as having room for swap files(drive space substitute for system memory) created by both Windows and softwares. If the primary does get infected with any pests you simply reformat and reinstall Windows plus etc. while keeping any important files safe on an extended partition. The last option was mentioned earlier of using other media for storage if not adding a second drive for backups. Frequent backups are really the best idea to preserve your important and often "lost-for-good" files if the drive itself fails.
 
OvenMaster said:
Oh? :D Ever been here?: http://audiokarma.org
Tom
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No I can't say I've been to that site for sure. But one method for saving stuff was connect audio into the sound card and first create wav files for later conversion to mp3. Now everything is geared towards capturing/editing security videos to preserve on disk from analog sources. But I occasionally like to stock up on game mods as well as some saves and screenshots. Those jpg files can also add up fast. :o
 
A username said:
Oh boy, you could have kept the original :rolleyes:

But, as I would say, 80GB is a best fit.
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Upon looking at your specs the first thing to note on the two newest systems is the drive capacity. In both cases the drive space is well over 100gb. Are your file sizes averaging into the gigibytes or just megabytes? For a basic system for a few games, utilities, occasional media file, and checking the email the mid sized drives will usually pass. But if there any large volume of video and audio files along with other types being stored on a drive capacity becomes the key word. With a small drive you can run out of space sooner then you would think! :eek: A large drive also allows room for more then one partition and still having space left over.
 
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