Monday, November 30, 2009

My Personal Experience with Cheap Hard Drives

If you looking to replace a hard drive in your old computer you're probably looking at cheap hard drives. After all, with a bad economy everyone is looking to save some money, right? Exactly, I know how you feel because I was in the same situation about 6 months ago.

First of all, I am not some computer geek. My computer crashed and I had no clue why it wouldn't boot up. I called a friend of mine who fixes PC's and he came over. He ran some diagnostics and determined that my hard drive was bad. He told me to search online for a cheap IDE hard drive. So off i went.

Not knowing that much about hard drives other than I needed an internal IDE hard drive, I started researching. The first thing I found was most newer drives are SATA so my choices were limited. On the other hand, I found that I could get a new hard drive with twice the capacity of my old one for less than $50. This was good news!

I found that many people online recommended Amazon or NewEgg because they are reliable and offer fast delivery. Plus they have reviews from people that have already purchased the hard drive. I ended up buying a 160GB Western Digital Caviar Blue for $43.99 plus shipping that had great reviews on NewEgg.

I was pleasantly surprised when my new drive arrived 2 days later. I called my friend back and he came over the next day. It took him all of 20 minutes to install my new hard drive. We then installed Windows XP and my machine was back up and running. So my experience with a cheap hard drive turned out to be OK.