Hard Drive Question..

[vic_vega]

Ok, I am probably right when I say that ripping alot of big files, and converting all the time, with all kinds of videos, etc, etc. Wears down your hard drive, and eventually wear out.

Am I correct? Because I don't know a whole lot about the specifications of hard drives, and what wears them down. And if so, I think that I am going to cut down on big video stuff.

(although as a side note, I would like to say that I DO keep up my hard drive, and clean it once/twice daily, and I don't mean using some anti-virus software, I mean I clean it up manually, etc.) So would this be a factor? (keeping the hard drive in good shape)

[WildmanJoe]

Let me put it this way:

Regardless of whether or not you are doing anything on your hdd, it still spins at 7200rpm. A hdd is meant for storage, meaning you have to read/write to it. Although constant writing to it may eventually wear it down (I'm talking about large files here ~GBytes), if it is meant to fail you, it will fail you.

[rsquirell]

Two words...Western Digital

[littlemouse]

Keep your hard-drive in sharp with Norton SystemWorks. My hard-drives never betray me; they still good after 3 years... I think hard-drives are happy with Norton SystemWorks, so they live longer...

[vic_vega]

Hey thanks LittleMouse.

Rsuirell, I think that my hard drive is A western-digital, the name of it under it's property is: WDC WD1000BB-00CAA1, and someone told me that that name sounds like a Western - Digital name (I think because of the WD part)

[vic_vega]

Yeah, there is nothing wrong with my hard-drive, but I was just curious as to how converting,and passing around big vid files affects hard drives.

[nzjacob]

Do what I did.

Go get a Firewire 800 - 500GB LaCie External

60MB/s plus I can take it around with me (Kinda)

This has ment I keep my all important system drive out of the way of all the ripping/encoding/decoding/editing/etc etc

Of course if you dont have a firewire 800 card, you will ahve to caugh up for one too, but trust me - best way to play digitally.

[littlemouse]

Back to the first post, I think many factors can wear down your hard-drive daily. It doesn't matter that you use internal or external hard-drive. I don't know how to keep my in good sharp (really). I use two internal hard-drive (Western Digital), one is 80 GB (drive C) and the other 200GB for copy and store DVD movies. I try to do these things on the regular basic:
- Don't open and use many applications at the same time
- Optimize the hard-drive with Norton SystemWorks once a month.
- Leave 20% space for hard-drive
- Don't install many applications (as least as possible )
- Use Norton Disk Doctor every three months
I accept the logic reason that everything has born will die someday (even human's life). So no matter how much we try, the hard-drive will be dead one day...

[Oriphus]

What way is the hd formated - NTFS or Fat32?

[littlemouse]

If you want to DO movies, you NEED to format the hard-drive to NTFS. Fat32 will not store the big movie files, it's bad as food's left outside the refrigerator for over one week.
Of course, my hard-drives are NTFS..

[Oriphus]

Yeah - fat32 is pretty useless since it wont handle 4GB files

[The Edge]

Just get 12Gb of RAM and make a ramdrive.
No moving parts = no wear/tear!

Edge

[Oriphus]

Yeah, i dont have a couple of grand to spend unfortuntely or i wouldve done that