Advice on hard drives?

[dr4b]

Hey, does anyone know about hard drives? That is, do you all know more than I do about hard drives? It can't be hard to, since I know very little.

Since I'm so deadly paranoid about my hard drive since the last time it blew up and Roman saved the day for me, I decided to go get a new hard drive before my current one dies. (I don't actually think my current one is anywhere near dying, and I was actually thinking I might use it as a backup now that I have a new one.)

My old one's a Maxtor 40GB drive. My new one's a Seagate 80GB drive, 7200 RPM ATA/IDE blah blah blah. But I honestly can't remember what I've heard about Seagate. So can one of you hard drive gurus enlighten me? Am I doomed? Should I go exchange it before it blows up my system?

Comments

^^ good advice

[aquatwo.livejournal.com]

i second this, heartily. pick up a copy of ghost if you're a win user. download a freebie equiv if you're running *nix at home. backup your system load to removable media and reload regularly. archive your data files on a schedule to removable media. DVD-rs are cheap nowadays, <$150 for good ones. media is <$1.50/4.7gb disc. feel free to splurge for a rw if ya want, use thatf or your ghosts/images and use cheapo DVD-rs and CD-rs for data files.

drives going bad should only impact $$ and whatever you hadn't backed up that day/week (whatever your archive frequency is), nothing more.

discipline = t3h win! ^_^

Re: ^^ good advice

[luminifer.livejournal.com]

what's the long-term reliability prediction on dvdr's these days?

Re: ^^ good advice

[aquatwo.livejournal.com]

i'm not sure. long enough for me though...