Calling all Computer Guru's: "C" Drive needs to be replaced. All I can find are OEM's

Here's the deal,

I don't want an OEM drive because, WD won't warranty it.

My understanding is hard drives that come packaged with ONLY the bare drive are OEM. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I did find one Retail Drive at the WD Store, but there seems to be, discussion, about this drives (WD 1TB Black Internal) being relabeled Blue Drives. That was posted by an Amazon reviewer. Model in question: WD1003FZEX

So, I am absolutely fit to be tied.

Can you help me out? What would you do?

Thanks in advance...

The only packaged hard drives that exist are

Western Digital

Seagate

Toshiba

IBM

Samsung

Lacie for Apple

check out www.newegg.com

very good online store.

do not buy seagate. They tend to go bad from my experience

rockero said:

The only packaged hard drives that exist are

Western Digital

Seagate

Toshiba

IBM

Samsung

Lacie for Apple

check out www.newegg.com

very good online store.

do not buy seagate. They tend to go bad from my experience

Click to expand...

+1 on all that ... I hope you have a backup of your data, or at least a fresh copy of your Operating system on disk.

I'd also like to add www.tigerdirect.com as a good place to shop.

OEM do not have the packaging but they cost less because they don't spend money on putting a box and hard drive information inside the box. It's usually just in a anti static bag or plastic bag.

Yes buy an external drive or large flash drive and back up your data.

rockero said:

Yes buy an external drive or large flash drive and back up your data.

Click to expand...

This. As soon as you decide which drive to buy, it doesn't matter if it's oem or retail packaging. They're the same. Oems just lack the necessary cables and screws, which you already have.
For what it's worth, I am a big fan of Western Digital.

FWIW.

I have 2 matching WD Blues which I use for my main drive and my primary back-up. I also have a couple of old drives for 3rd and 4th backups but those are really old Hitachi and a old WD Black and starting to fail.

I also have a StarTech Drive Duplicator.

Every 3 to 4 weeks, I take the drive out of my computer (desktop) and make 3 duplicates of the drive. Call me paranoid but frequent power outages from plugging in the vacuum cleaner have killed 3 drives in 4 years.

I only use WD Blue since that's what I can buy locally but I'd rather have the 24/7 Black drives.

No difference between OEM and fancy box. My retailer here just puts the OEM in their box and puts in on the shelf.

If the drive is still working, get the duplicator and a drive that matches the capacity of the old drive and copy it. Then buy a second drive and duplicate it again.

Paranoia Pays.

As for warranty, TigerDirect and NewEgg both offer add-on warranties which are reasonably priced even if WD or others won't warranty it.

OEM can mean several things.
OEM as in drives sold specifically to manufacturers to be put into pre-built computers. If one of those failed, you would go through warranty from the computer manufacturer.
OEM packaging are just drives sold without the retail packaging. Most of those do have full manufacturer warranties if you are the original purchaser.

If you want a WD drive, there's a list of their drives and warranty periods on their website:
http://support.wdc.com/Warranty/warrantyPolicy.aspx
The list of authorized retailers can be found at:
http://www.wdc.com/en/buy/

The FZEX series has a 5-year warranty weather you get it in "Component"(OEM) packaging or retail packaging.

If your C drive needs to be replaced, then you probably already have the cables necessary, a drive in OEM packaging is fine and will be cheaper than a retail drive.
I'd advise you look at the amount of space you need and get an appropriately sized drive. If your old drive was not close to being full, then no need to spend the extra money.

If your C: drive needs to be replaced then just go to the local computer store such as MicroCenter or Best Buy and get a Western Digital or Seagate or Toshiba. Next connect it to your current computer and clone your current C: drive to the new drive and then swap out. The drives usually come with a free utility or they will have it on their web page that helps do this. Have done it lots of time.

Consider replacing your current hard drive with a Solid-State or Hybrid drive ... you'll experience much faster access time from boot-up to browsing.

Solid-state has come down a lot in price, but its still more expensive than a conventional hard disk. If your current drive is 1Tb but you're only using less than 100Gb like I am, you can get a much smaller SSD, around 128Gb as a replacement.

And if you're not doing so already, look into Windows ReadyBoost feature. This allows you to plug a fast SD card into your machine and designate this for caching purposes ... it will speed up your system tremendously. Just be sure to pick the fastest SD card you can find and that it has sufficient storage space. Windows will choose the size of the ReadyBoost drive and allocate accordingly. My SD card is 128Gb and Windows dedicated 32Gb of this to ReadyBoost.

What do you need to accomplish?

Is your default HDD dead? Is it failing? Do you just need more space?

If its dead/failing you'll probably want to take it in somewhere to see if the data can be recovered for you. You CAN do this yourself but based on the fact that you're asking us for HDD information means you're not a guru yourself and in that case you certainly don't want to try to recover information from a failed drive.

If you're just looking to expand - go with an external drive. This way you don't need to worry about cloning or anything. You just have to move stuff that you want to save (like pictures, music, etc) to the external and your operating system and software can just continue to run on the original.

Thanks for all the replies.

That was the first thing I thought of. I was looking at the Samsung 840 Evo Pro, I think they call it. But, I have a SATA 2 ports, and the guy (who we think to be good) in the Easy Tech Dept. said I'd see a negligible increase in performance. 5 or ten percent. Not much for the amount of money I would be spending. (I'm looking at the 500gb drive.) I have used 270 - 290 Gb over 4 years.

The guy at Staples also told me only to put your Applications on your C: drive. (I have a lot more than that right now.) And put everything else on another drive. I have a backup of the drive, C: that I made with (Retrospect 7.7) That I could run and that would be that. But I heard on YouTube that, that is not the best way, because, if you change your partitions from what they were originally, on the original drive, then you lose the ability to perform a system recover, (in my case in the form of a USB drive.) Meaning HP gives you the ability to make a copy of a recovery disk...

It's not that I couldn't change out a hard drive, I have. I just don't want to go through that again. Trying to pull out the molex cable was the worst of it. It was the total opposite experience of working on a Mac IIci. Total Nirvana by comparison. I'd love to buy the computer where they have those plastic sleds put the drive into that and just push it in and connect the cables. Easy.

As a previous poster wrote, Solid State Drives are the way to go. My PC boots up faster than my phone with one. They are more expensive than the old tech per size, but run your OS and paging file on one of these for a tremendous speed boost, and if you need cheap storage use a second HD for items where speed is not a factor.

I wouldn't even bother with the warranties on computer equipment. Prices are always dropping, and warranties seem to always expire just before the hardware dies.

Edit: as far as backing up is concerned, I can see how a system image would have problems if partitions change, but I much prefer to only backup critical data and perform a clean install if needed. It's a little more work when/if it needs to be done, but I think its less of a headache overall. Though, realistically, how often do you expect to be altering partitions?

And I would put applications, OS, paging file on the fast Solid State, and use a slower bigger HD for simply storing files, though with how much you use perhaps you can just pick up a 500gb SSD that will work for everything.

I also would go with SSD. The speed of them easily makes up for the cost.

I'm running a Samsung 840 Evo 120GB with my OS install alongside a 1TB Seagate for media, the difference between running the OS from the rotating rust and the SSD is far more than 5-10%.

Hi guys,

My first "instinct" was to go SSD. But this Computer is from 2011 and SATA II ports. Sooooo, how much of a spped gain do you guys think I'll see? With an SSD drive built for a SATA III stepped down to a SATA II? As far as I know, my ports support 3 Gbps.

How fast can the Samsung transfer data? Is the Samsung capable of transfer rates of 3 Gbps?

I would just go with a SATA drive and forget about SSD because you are saying your system is from 2011. To install a SSD drive you might need to add some adapters to your board for it to work. I have no experience with installing SSD drives, so I am not sure.

Tom's Hardware seems to thinks it's well worth it if you are running hardware post 2005 sata II or III:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ssd-upgrade-sata-3gbps,review-32673.html


From the final page:

Our real-world metrics demonstrate that those theoretical differences aren't always practical, though. In most cases, a SATA 3Gb/s-attached Samsung 840 Pro is almost as fast as the same drive connected to a 6 Gb/s link.

Click to expand...

Sata 3 supports 3 gb transfer speeds, sata 2 supports 300 mb/s. I'm rocking an older setup from 2010 and the difference with SSD is night and day. I believe I have Sata 2 ports since winsat is showing speeds around 300mb/s, but short of taking apart the computer the motherboard info is not given anywhere for me and it has been a while since I built it.

I think, and I'm no SSD expert but I do love having a couple, that a big factor is not just raw transfer speed, but access time, which solid states do a lot faster.