160gb Hard drive failures!

I'm planning to buy a compal hg30 this week from a barebones reseller and was considering buying a 160gb perpendicular hard drive hitachi/seagate for my HD. After reading at newegg's customer who bought the seagate momentus units, almost half of them have hard drive failures after a couple of months or so. There were 10 reviews for the Hitachi and they were all positive. I was just wondering whats the viability of these drives if it's worth buying it now or maybe the Hitachi is more reliable or none of them at all. I'm a club DJ who plays in front of a large crowd almost every month. I need the drive space for my music and the last thing I want to see is the laptop's HD that I'm using suddenly out of nowhere fails and never recover from a crash. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

maybe i'm overly skeptical, but i don't trust those little newegg "blurb" reviews that much. however, new tech always has it's problems; some more than others. if you're in a mission cricital situation, you shouldn't be using new tech anyway. you would be better off with a 3.5" external drive solution as you would get much more space for much less $. as well, 3.5" pull a/c from their own source so you you don't have to worry about the 2.5" drive suddenly losing connection do to a lack of power from the usb port.

bottom line is that i wouldn't buy it; buy a 3.5" drive and an external enclosure instead.

EDIT: just noticed that you were thinking of this for your internal drive, but i still stand by my recommendation. buy a smaller, less expensive drive and run your media from an external source.

 

If you're worried, check out either the 200GB 4200RPM or 100GB 5400RPM drives.

 

drumfu: I'm kinda opposite... I don't want to have something dangling externally all the time. I only want that for rarely accessed data. Give me all the storage I can have internally, at my fingertips (especially since it doesn't pose a power penalty), and an external drive for extra space. Besides, most external cases can only handle up to 120GB drives.

 

You’re thinking of a 2.5" drive? As drumfu, I would vote 3.5" firewire or SATA external for “club” use. I see external WD drives 160 to 300GB on sale, but USB only if you prefer, and a possible "write protect" failure doesn't bother you. Anyway having all your MP3s in one basket could be a disaster for DJ use so two external drives would make sense if the budget allows for it.

 

Thanks all for your responses. I move around from club to club and I like the internal drive setup (2.5) and try to avoid an external drive dangling from the laptop. During a gig, I move around so fast and the danger of pulling or tripping on something is there so I try to avoid cables if I can do away with them. Another thing is that the 160gb that I was considering will be the laptop's main drive and even if I plugged in an external drive, I am concerned about the 160gb internal's performance, your external might be ok but if the main's fail, everything else won't work. I prefer to lug smaller drives than the 3.5s. I always bring with me my CDs in case of a chaotic situation like a laptop failure.

 

What ever floats the boat However, if your internal goes your really SOL. If minimalist is what you want, keep that original formatted and loaded internal drive as a spare. You can shut down, swap, reboot in 4 minutes flat.