hard drive brands

hard drive brands

Ok, I'm building a comp for some friends of mine. They're older, in their 50's and basically need a comp to surf the web, check e-mail and do word processing. That's about as intense as their use gets.

So I'm going a celeron 2 Ghz on a SOYO mobo. As far as hard drives go, I'm looking at brands now since all other specs in the range I'm looking for are essentially the same, to include price. I'm talking IDE hard drives, Ultra ATA 100, 7200 rpm, 2 mb cache, 40 Gb. Also looking at burner brands as well.

What brands do you consider tops? Also, leave comments and suggestions here for the computer I'm building them. Remember, it doesn't need a lot of punch for heavy computing cause they won't be doing any. The most advanced stuff they'll be doing is burning cd's. Here's what I have in mind:

HDD's:

• Maxtor
• Seagate
• Western Digital

Burner's:

• Artec
• Mercury
• IBM
• Optorite
• Plextor
• Sony
• TDK

Proposed Setup:

• P4 2.0 Celeron - $70
• Soyo - P4I 845PE Lite - Intel Socket 478 ATX Mobo - $30
• 40 Gb HDD, 7200 RPM - (have on hand)
• 512 PC2700 DDR SDRAM - $60
• 64 Mb AGP Video - (have on hand)
• 52x32x52x CD-RW - $30
• 1.44" floppy - (have on hand)
• Soundblaster Sound - (have on hand)
• 300W Mid-Tower case - $30
• 56k modem - (have on hand)

So, any thoughts on this setup? Any thoughts on good parts websites (I've been using tigerdirect.com)? Any thoughts on how to keep the price down?

 

pricewatch.com is a good website for checking out the prices of stuff. Other than that, I got nothing for you. We sell Maxtor hard drives at Staples and I've never heard a complaint about them. They go on sale every now and then too.

 

If your going to buy a new MOBO and processor, I would go with an AMD Athalon. They are MUCH better than the Celeron (lol, whats not better), and they are relativly cheap.

Here is an example of a MOBO combo with an AMD Athalon XP 2600 (much better than what you have spec'd for roughly the same price:

Click Here

Its only a little over 100 bucks for the processor and mobo.


As for your brands on HDs....they look like what I would go with.

 

I'd go for a Western Digital HD. They're suppossed to be good.Seagate... I can't remember if they're good or POSs.

 

He speaks the truth. Go AMD.

What I was told by someone more knowledgeable than I on the matter a while ago when I was looking to buy a new computer...

"yeah. another little thing about AMD/Intel. unless things have changed since I bought mine, AMD chips tend to run at a slow speed with performance equivalent to a faster Intel chip. So AMD 'rates' their chip sort of comparatively.

Thus, I have a 2.2ghz AthlonXP 2700 chip, which is about on par with a 2.7ghz Pentium 4 chip I think.

AMD chips tend to be a bit less expensive, so if you are building your own computer people tend to prefer them.

You get different types of motherboards for the different chipsets; better mobos maybe have more options, can be upgraded to a faster chip, support more RAM, etc.

Macs are overpriced since Apple has a hardware monopoly; don't waste your time unless you do professional graphic design or need training wheels."

 

I've heard excellent things about WD. Back when I built my system, I had a WD with no problems. Lasted a goodly time too.

Sony makes a good burner. Again, I used two with no complaints.

I'd REALLY consider upgrading the sound and video gards, though. Is a 64 MB going to be enough?

 

If he's looking to build one on a budget, and they're not going to be using it for anything grapic intense, it should be fine. Like he said, the most advanced stuff they'll be doing is burning CDs. While it wouldn't hurt to up it, if it's for limited use, I don't think it'll be all that necessary.

 

Looks pretty good to me Sarge. I agree with your choice of Celeron BTW, unless the oldies are into FPSers a 2GHz Celery is plenty. Plus, it produces a lot less heat than Athlons, which generally makes for a quieter PC potentially.

I would go with WD HHD's. Maxtor are okay, but a bit loud IMO (having got a 120GB #9 one). Seagate have a good returns policy in the EU, but the quality of the drives are slightly lower from what I have heard.

As for burners, Plextor is great but Sony is probably the best. Building to a budget I would go with Plextor, but for the piece of mind that a brand sometimes gives people, Sony maybe better.

For what they are getting the price is superb, but don't forget monitors, keyboards and mice, internal case fans. Also make sure that all cables are supplied.

Keep a look out for deals, especially on burners and cases, and try to buy from one supplier if you can to keep down delivery costs (often the bane of many a budget PC).

Good luck with it all.

 

Also, it's really true what they say. Celeron's are crap. We have them in some of our older computers at work. The most use these computers have got over the past year and a half or so are running Word and Excel, and occasionally printing something out, and they hardly run anymore.

 

I got a new AMD Athalon XP 2800 and it's plenty quiet. It's actually a lot quieter than my grandparents new P4.

 

GIR, it depends what your intended use for them is. If it is just word processing and low quality (i.e. Civ2, solitaire etc) gaming then Celerons are fine. Same goes for internet browsing.

If you need to do things with a little more grunt, then sure, you need a CPU with more cache than a Celeron. But I don't think that one should discount them straight away.

EDIT:

It depends on your HSF arrangement as to the noise level, not necessarily the speed. Thus, the lower the power consumption and thus heat dissapation of the CPU, the more options on HSF (and overall case cooling) you have.

Plus, P4's are not Celerons (as you know), and to get truly good cooling on an Athlon you need the non-retail HSF's. Which eats into budget yet again.

 

An athalon wont run hot enough to cause a problem though. Nothing that the ole fan in the back of the case cant handle.

Seriously, Celerons are horrible processors....trust me and GIR on this one....or do some of your own research. Pentiums are alright I guess, but they are expensive. Athalon XPs are currently a GREAT deal right now. When you compare them apples to apples with an intel processor (namely pentiums), they beat them in price and performance.


edit:

Thing is...Athalons cost the same as Celerons roughly. And you get 100000% more performance out of them.

 

Ignore ANY advice about guying a celeron. The celeron is EXTREMELY slow. The AMD Duron 1600 mhz is faster than any celeron on the market. You could of course buy a normal AMD Athlon XP or Barton though for a few bucks more and the performance it offers over the celeron is huge. Sure, today they might only be using the
computer for email but someday they might discover Photoshop or something and besides, buying a faster computer today means it will last longer.

 

Considering they really only use the computer for surfing, e-mail, word processing and cd-burning, I'd say the sound and video are more than adequate.

I agree with the HDD and burner though, I've had both with no complaints.

 

Heh, looks like I am getting shouted down here.

Toader, I do know more than a little about these things. Seriously. I definitely know that compared to Athlons Celerons don't cut it, but round my neck of the woods budget CPU's such as celerons and durons are much cheaper. Don't assume that I know nothing, you would be working under an incorrect assumption.


Sarge, in the end go with what you think is right, and I cannot say under any stretch of the imagination that an Athlon is a bad purchase. It looks like these guys are against Celerons, and that is okay, so go with the body of public opinion if you desire.

 

Well, I'm partial to AMD myself as they seem to get more bang for the buck. I found a 1.8 duron and a mobo that together would be $**.

I'm thinking that might be the way to go.

 

That's pretty much all the ones we have at work are used for, and now, about a year-year and a half or so of use, they hardly run anymore. Now that's been my experience. You of course could have had better experiences with them though.

 

go with either a WD or seagate hd (i have used both with no problems) we (best buy) have an 80 gb WD HD on sale this week... $50 after mail in rebate (100 original)...

for burners, go with a lite on... just built my comp, and i have a lite on 32x burner in it, and it works great. and they are cheap too

as people said, go with an amd... they are relatively inexpensive, and they work a ton better than a celeron... either like an athlon xp 2500+ barton (1.83 ghz, 512kb cache) or if they dont need that much processing power, a duron 1600 (some1 said it above me).

 

I'll jump in on the AMD bandwagon too. If the choice is Celeron or AMD, I'd pick the AMD. Did a quick look on a couple of sites. For $5 more, you can get a boxed Athlon XP 2200+, running at 1.8 GHz. Gives them roughly the same speed with onboard cache. They may not need the extra "oomph", but for no extra cost, why not give it to them?

As for HDD, I've had great luck with both Maxtor and WD. Don't by any of the store knockoffs....coughCompusacough....utter crap. I was trying to go cheap on a second system and it crapped out in under 6 months.

For burners, I've had good luck with TDK and Sony. Really would come down to price as to which one I picked.

Based on your description of what they will be using the computer for, I would also guess that they will be viewing a lot of emailed pics of grandkids, family, etc. If that's the case, go ahead and bump the RAM up a bit more. I bumped the RAM up on my folks system so they could see pics of the grandkids better and it helped system performance. Of course, the saw nothing wrong with having a dozen large photos open at once and trying to edit and print them.

 

The only thing that I don't agree with on the Celeron/budget issue is longevity. While the Celerons may have the slightly lower cost, if any, that doesn't mean a whole lot in terms of budget if you have to replace the CPU after a year or so.

To Serge, what it really boils down to is this. When buying/building a computer, you get what you pay for. I've found this to be very true.