Hi, I'm looking for some advice on what to do to add hard drive storage space to my PC. My current spec is as follows:

Athlon 2700+
ASUS A7N8X-D
1024MB Corsair 3200
Radeon 9600 Pro
NEC 3550A DVD-RW
Lite-On LTR-522465 CD-RW
Western Digital 2500JD
Western Digital 1200JB
Western Digital 2500JB
Western Digital 2000JB
Western Digital 3000JB

The 2000JB and 3000JB are in USB external caddies and the others are internals.

So, what I'd like to do is add around 2 terabytes, to end up with a total capacity around 3 terabytes. At the moment, I'm considering removing the current 2500JD SATA drive and adding 2 1TB SATA-II drives (these, potentially) and changing the current 1200JB for a much larger capacity IDE drive (this one, possibly). However, from what I've read the 1 terabyte SATA-II drives can be a bit hot, so I might be better off getting a couple of external 1TB SATA-II drives in cooled caddies instead.

So, what advice can you guys give me on how hot big SATA-II drives run or how to save money on these upgrades? Thanks in advance.

SATAII drives dont get that hot - no hotter than a SATAI drive, although IMO SATAII is pointless as only RAID0'ed Raptors kiss the limit of SATAI and thats only for a tiny amount of time. Just have a nice front case fan and you'll be fine.

Why do you want such a massive amount of space?

It wasn't really a choice to go for SATA-II over SATA or IDE for the terabyte drives, as far as I'm aware the only terabyte drives available at the moment are the SATA-II ones. My motherboard can't exploit the supposed improvement of SATA-II over SATA anyway, so that doesn't factor in. Good news on the temp then, I was a bit worried the SATA-II drives might run a bit hot.

The reason I need so much space is that I have one of the most expansive private Power Rangers collections in the world.

Power Rangers, eh? :X

What about these drives? 500 GB, £68 - better value, but would make more heat in the case.

Of couse with the cash you save you could get some VERY nice HDD coolers and enough cash left for some more space, cooling, better mobo etc...

Yeah, I love Power Rangers

I don't want to get bogged down with a myriad of smaller drives, I'd rather have just 2 or 3 large ones. I want large partitions rather than my current many smaller partitions and I don't want to set up a RAID across drives. Saving money isn't an issue either, as I'm only going to be able to afford them when I get a job and once I get a job I'll have enough to afford things easily.

keep in mind though that if you dont raid them a failed huge drive hurts a lot more than a failed smaller one

Quote from Shotglass :

keep in mind though that if you dont raid them a failed huge drive hurts a lot more than a failed smaller one

I'm prepared for a total hard drive failure, so that's not an issue either. Losing a terabyte would be a right pain in the rear end though, you're right. Touch wood, I've never had a total hard drive failure before though.

cant really touch wood on this one buddy...HDD's WILL die at some point.. especially the larger drives (over 120gb or so) because on some file systems it has been known to corrupt data.

And you want 3TB of stuff for power rangers?

Forget the harddrives amp you need a new office chair first pikey!! lol

Hehe, aye aye. My chair pwns yours, we all know it.

Och, I'm prepared for a hard drive failure but they're not that common, certainly in my experience. I need the space for 'Power Rangers', yes.

Quote from DANDAMAN05 :

cant really touch wood on this one buddy...HDD's WILL die at some point.. especially the larger drives (over 120gb or so) because on some file systems it has been known to corrupt data.

And you want 3TB of stuff for power rangers?

Hard drives don't die that often - most drives not subjected to extreme temperatures should last over 5 years, plus you can always back up

Quote from DANDAMAN05 :

cant really touch wood on this one buddy...HDD's WILL die at some point.. especially the larger drives (over 120gb or so) because on some file systems it has been known to corrupt data.

I really wouldn't worry that much about HDD failure, we've got some Pentium 1 PC's in our house that were used heavily in an office for most of their life, not had one HDD failure from any of the 4 or so we've got. I can only assume today's HDDs are more reliable again. Of course that's not to say you shouldn't be prepared.

I don't think there are any modern (post XP SP1) operating systems/filesystems that corrupt data on large discs.

Finally I can't see bigger capacity HDDs getting much hotter than smaller ones, if the discs are constantly spinning there can't be much difference.

The 130MB Seagate HDD from my 486 worked perfectly when it was skipped. Was 10 years old at the time. Generally drives die in the first few weeks if they're going to die at all. Incidentally I also threw the memory (four matched 30 pin SIMMs) out of a second story window onto hard ground, plugged them in and they still worked, error free. Electronics are quite durable.

Quote from Bob Smith :

Incidentally I also threw the memory (four matched 30 pin SIMMs) out of a second story window onto hard ground, plugged them in and they still worked, error free.

LOL.

I have to ask, why?

I was young, and bored. I didn't really expect them to work afterwards. Testing them was an afterthought.