It’s the latest disc I bought for this PC, and it seems to be the first to die on me. I randomly hangs or gives “delayed write failed” errors in Windows. If I wait long enough, the system will get back to live and will be responsive, until I do something that needs to access this disc.
At the moment, I don’t have the financials to replace it with a big SCSI disc. I can replace it with the same size disc, but it was cramped already. So I started to have a look at S-ATA, in particular controllers that support Tagged Command Queueing and discs that support Native Command Queueing. So far, I came up with:
– Promise SATA II 150 TX2 Plus: you can have 2 SATA and 2 PATA discs, and it supports TCQ.
– Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Plus with NCQ, 160GB, or
– WD Caviar Special Edition (with NCQ), 160GB.
The controller costs about 42 euros, the Seagate is 89 and the WD is 86 euro. Add an S-ATA cable of 4 euros to the total and for about 135-140 euros I have 160GB of disc-space. A replacement Atlas 10K3 is about 150 euros (for 36GB, since you can’t buy 18GB anymore).