I need advice on Internal HD

[jkpieren]

My internal HD died recently? It is no longer under any warranty, I have a 20' IMAC the aluminum kind.
Does anyone have any recommendations for a good internal HD for booting up on. I have had two die already on this computer.

It seems that anything higher then 500gb seems to fail more. I want a lot of memory, quiet and fast. If anyone has some info that would be appreciated!
THanks

 

[BlueRevolution]

I put a 1.5 TB SeaGate 7200.11 drive into my early 2008 (aluminium) iMac last summer after the warranty ended and it's still working fine. Really, any 3.5" SATA drive will work.

If you're having problems with hard drives dying, there may be a heat issue in your computer. Hard drives respond poorly to temperatures over 60-65ºC. Try downloading the Temperature Monitor app and see what sort of temperatures you have in there.

 

[Alonzo84]

So hard drive issues aren't related to their capacity? (i.e. 500gb has more problems vs. 250gb)
Other threads have stated that larger capacity hard drives perform better in terms of speed compared to smaller ones even if they are both 5400rpm. Is this true?

 

[BlueRevolution]

So hard drive issues aren't related to their capacity? (i.e. 500gb has more problems vs. 250gb)

The biggest hard drives available at any given time have a tendency to be bleeding edge, so the reliability suffers because of that. However, I wouldn't worry too much about any drive at this point, since 2 TB drives have been out for quite a while and most of the kinks have been ironed out. I doubt if there's any correlation between size and reliability for drives under 1 TB.

Of course, it goes without saying that you should always maintain a backup no matter how reliable your drive may be. Every hard drive will die eventually.

Other threads have stated that larger capacity hard drives perform better in terms of speed compared to smaller ones even if they are both 5400rpm. Is this true?

I've certainly found it to be the case. I didn't think to do any benchmarking, but my 1.5 TB drive is easily twice as fast at copying large files between partitions and installing applications as the stock 320 GB SeaGate 7200.10 drive was.

(SeaGate's designation 7200.10 is the model/series, not speed. It refers to revision 10 of the 7200 RPM line.)