Need Help Urgently - Failed HDD in Blackhawk XR5 Raid 5, x3 200gb Seagates

As the title suggests, I have recently had a HDD failure (1 of 3 - managed to boot in safe mode, copy all my important data, and have not rebooted since; 4 days ago today the incident hapened) in my Blackhawk XR5 :cry:. Is there any reseller I can buy a new set of HDD's off for a Clevo D900C? If I could buy three larger size HDD's (more GB), awesome. But it is rather urgent, considering the issue with PC microworks. I was thinking Sager as they have Clevo based notebooks (I think??). I am happy to pay $$ over to the US resellers to buy the parts and have them sent via fedex as I live in New Zealand, and I am sure either I can reinstall the HDD's or I can find a computer shop who will. Any advice and help would be appreciated, especially if those of you know any NZ based resellers who will stock the appropriate HDD's. All other components are fine.

Please, I don't want to hear anything about PCMW , I just want to fix my laptop - it's been trouble free up until now.

Thanks all in advance for your help, suggestions.

-Coors916

 

Can't you just buy any standard SATA 2.5" HDDs?

 

Yea dude, they're just HDDs. PCM didn't install anything special, just regular HDDs. Get them 2.5" HDDs and install.

 

ya u can get standard 2.5 inch drives and just use the caddy which u got with ur original drives.. best ones is 500GB hitachi 7k500 7200rpm drive.

 

Hey guys,

Really appreciate the feedback. I went online and didn't realise how much there was on the market. Hitachi you say? I heard WD was also quite good?

I'm going into some resellers in NZ and see what HDD's I can get through them, and I'll ask about the Hitachi as well.

Thanks guys (managed to boot into normal OS with two of the drives.)

Now my next question, is raid 5 worth it? Any opinions, or should I just stick with 3 hard drives with the other two data back up & storage? Seeing as I'll have to rebuild the array onto the new disk which seems pretty simple; instead I'm going to replace all three with bigger HDD's and the question is do i bother with raid or not?

EDIT: JUst came accross the Seagate Momentus Xt 500GB - x3 of these in raid 5? Would they fit in place of my three Seagate 7200rpm's?

 

If the data is really important sure why not. There are so many ways to do backup that IMO can be cheaper than having RAID 5.

 

yup they will.. should be quite a nice upgrade too...

 

If you had a drive failure and raid 5, why don't you just buy a single drive comparable to the two that are left and just rebuild the array from that? You don't need a new "set" of drives if one dies. That is the whole point of raid 5, able to survive and rebuild after the failure of any single drive in the system.

 

Yeah, the entire point of RAID5 is that you get striping + distributed parity.

You got the best case scenario; 1 disk fails, so you just replace it with another disk, and rebuild the array. You could probably even replace it with a 500GB Momentus XT and rebuild it on that. The capacity would be limited to 200GB, but you can do that with each disk to replace the entire array.

(I think, I'm not a RAID expert)