maximum size h/drive?

paul1672

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hi there.
i'm new to all this so excuse my naivity.
i have an asus a7v8x-mx se-eayz motherboard currently running with a 120gb seagate barracuda h/drive for my htpc.
what i was wondering is would it be ok to swap the 120gb drive for two 200gb drives??
would windows xp detect them?
if so,which drives would be best and quietest?
if not,what is the maximum size i can use and can i use two of them?
i'm looking to get as much h/drive space as possible,but i can only use two h/drives due to lack of room in my strata case (i'm a lazy bugger).
anyway,any help is much appreciated.
paul
 
XP will support up to 9 terabytes of storage natively (though of course you could then add network attached storage to expand it further).

This translates to 45 200Gb disks, so the answer is yes, it will see them ;)

Samsung Spinpoints aren't the cheapest but there's not much in it considering how long you are likely to keep them. They are very quiet and if you get ones with an 8Mb cache they will be futureproof for a fair while.

Matt
 
I have a 160gb 8mb sata Maxtor that I'm happy with, it's quite quiet too, they seem to be one of the best regarded manufactures of hard drives around.

Regards,
Iain.
 
IMHO - You cant go wrong with MAXTOR or WESTERN DIGITAL.

I notice that Western Digital are now doing a 250Gb Media Centre disc, which is presumably designed for what we use them for, so that may be worth a look.

Fujitsu used to be excellent but they went through are a really bad stage where a lot of them failed.

IBM are a decent drive but the two at the top are usually better.

Stay away from Seagates.

I look after a lot of kit and have never had a failure with the Maxtor or Western Digitals.

Hope this helps.
 
For greater than 132Gb apparently you need to make sure you have SP1 for XP !!

I agree on the Samsung, I just swapped my Maxtor DiamondMax9 SATA driver and a Western Digital Cavier out for Samsung SpinPoint and the noise reduction is amazing :) Bear in mind their max capacity is only 160Gb tho.
 
firstly,i'd like to thank you all for your replies.
so,am i right in saying that the 200 gb maxtor drive priced at £99 on the link i posted above should be ok then?
i'm thinking of going along the lines of keeping the seagate 120gb now and settling for one extra 200gb hard drive as i think i should be ok with 320gb of storage space.
should be able to store about 45 movies on that amount.
i could always swap my movies around as i need.
once again i thank you all for your valuable information.
all the best
paul
 
I would have a look at the Western Digital Quiet Drives from Scan. You get 3 Years Warranty with them and they are an excellent drive - I havent bought anything else for over 18 Months and there reliability is excellent.

I have used Samsung before (not the ones the guy above recommended) and they werent the greatest and I have said I do look after a lot of kit (over 500 machines) where reliability is paramount. Again theguy above didnt really replace like for like the Caviar is an older drive and SATA drives are noisier anyway - all IMHO of course.

Dont worry too much about the speed of the drive, its pretty irrelevant whether you use 7200 or 5400 for Movie Playback. Some of the guys buy the 5400 because they say they are quieter. I can honestly say that noise wise the good drives are much of a muchness - you get more noise from the fans than anything else.

Chris
 

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