Due for a new hard drive

[muskgrave]

in my experience once you start seeing bad sectors it's the beginning of the end for that drive. those bad sectors will multiply until your drive doesn't work anymore, regardless of whether or not you try to not write to those bad sectors. So don't use the drive! get a good replacement and copy your valuable data over.

[philly_phenom]

in my experience once you start seeing bad sectors it's the beginning of the end for that drive. those bad sectors will multiply until your drive doesn't work anymore, regardless of whether or not you try to not write to those bad sectors. So don't use the drive! get a good replacement and copy your valuable data over.

I'm aware that the drive is on the way out. I was mainly asking for advice on what to pick for a new one - I ended up ordering a WD 640 GB internal - I just have to figure how to get it in the case since it only has one HDD bay - I'll probably remove the floppy drive (not sure why it even has one) and see if it will work there. Right now, I copied everything over to to a much smaller drive (my recordings barely fit on it) while I wait for the new one to arrive.

I think Deus was right about externals not being good for this type of use. Often while recording or during playback, the drive case would be hot to the touch (as in I couldn't leave my hand on it). I had thought about adhering some heat sinks to the sides

Regardless, the drive had a 2 year manufacturers warranty, so i'm going to RMA it.

Thanks to you & everyone else for the replies.

[philly_phenom]

This always chaps my arse - even though I know that when they say 640 GB, they really mean 640,000,000,000 Bytes which is ~596 GB - 24 GB short of the listed size - that's ~ 3 hours of HD programming.

It didn't really make much difference when drives were <1GB, but as hard drive sizes increase, you'll plug in a 500TB drive & find out your almost 50TB short of what the listed size is...