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Hi , I need a hard drive & hard drive cooler But not sure which to buy, My son plays games & I use IT for digital Photography & Graphics manipulation Using Photoshop CS. So I need a fast Reliable SATA 1 HD & a HD Cooler such as the Zalman heatpipe HD cooler. the antec one with 2 fans and aluminium heatsink or even a vantec vortex HD cooler.
As I am on a very limited budget of around ?70 -80 for both items I need to know which is the better drive & the best cooling solution? appreciate your help.
Many thanks

Hey Rabidrat,

Didn't want you to think we were ignoring you. I'll PM a couple of the Hardware Gurus, this just isn't my area of expertise.

Keep an eye out for their replies.

See you in the forum.

TTFN

LGW

Hi there RR, sorry but do you mean £70 for both or each item?

Hi,

I hope I can help you a bit further, buying the HDD is really no big deal, I will just tell you what to look for:

make sure its S-ATA (if thats what you wanted)
Check the cache, higher = better (faster), 16mb is cool, 8mb is a bit slow
Check the brand, maxtor, seagate of western digital are first grade brands.
how large is it (200Gig, 250Gig) bigger is better, but something tells me you already knew that :P
and maybe the most important, the price, check many shops for prices, some shops are cheaper then others.

If you checked a HDD for all this, it should be OK.

now the cooling is a bit more difficult, I dont have any experience with that, but Im not sure why you want the cooling. Most of the HDDs run fine without any extra cooling, but its never a bad thing to have some more cooling. Maybe you can check the reviews on newegg, or any other hardware selling website. Most of the HDD coolers have a pretty good price/quality comparity (not sure if thats good english :undecided) , so more expensive, is usually better. Just check the prices, and experiences of other buyers.

Hope I helped you a bit,

Greetz,

RubenTC

Hi Rabidrat,

On the HDD front I am very much with RubenTC, the higher the cache the better, size does matter, especially if you are going to do photo editing, so try for one of the higher capacity drives e.g. 250Gb. The better manufacturers that I have come across are Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital. The Seagates are more expensive but are very reliable, Maxtor less expensive and good on the reliability, the Western Digital are pretty decent on both fronts.
Now to the cooling. I really beleive that if you have good airflow through the case, and decent ventilation around the case (no cramped into a small space) you shouldn't really need to cool the hard drive, but the Zlman would be a good choice out of the two mainly because it's quiet.
I hope that this helps and let us know what you decide on.

It was ?70 For both Items. I wish I could have afforded a 250Gig with 16mb Cache but I had to go for a 200 Gig Seagate Barracuda 7 with an 8 meg cache & an Antec Hard drive cooler with Fan & heatsink.
Thanks for your help eveyone it was appreciated. When I can afford to upgrade in 2 years I will make sure I look for a drive with a bigger cache (they will probably be about 32 meg or more by then)

Glad we could be of help, Rabidrat.
I'll mark this thread as answered.