New 40GB HD Kinda whines on a Win98 PC Dare to use on Amiga?

[Piru]

Whiney noises - that's Maxtor for you. Your guess is as good as anyone elses.

You could try booting with the diagnostic CD and letting it test the HDD, it might be able to tell whether it's dying or not. You need a PC for that though. Burn the ISO image to CD-R(W), plug the HDD to the PC, from bios set the PC to boot from the CD-ROM. Boot & test. Set everything back to previous state.

I hope the Seagate "maxtor"s will be more reliable....

[Piru]

@Speelgoedmannetje

The data on the dying HDD would disagree, though.

[Piru]

@marcfrick2112

Easy way to handle it:

- First download the ISO and burn it with Nero (works fine, just select 'Copy' and 'Burn from image' or so, my nero is in finnish so I can't know what the english one had...)

- Power off the system and unplug the current HDD. Remove both IDE cable and power (there is no need to detach the actual HDD from the case). Connect the IDE cable and power to the Maxtor drive to be tested (have it on the table or on top of a book or so, so it doesn't make contact and short. Well this is paranoia, but the bottom of the drive has some electronics exposed, so better not have anything metallic touch there when powered...). This way there is no way you can accidently feck up the original drive.

- Power on and go to the BIOS. Select CD-ROM as bootable device. Save changes and exit.

- Boot the system from the CD. Test the HDD.

- Once done, power off and remove the Maxtor HDD, replug the IDE cable and power to the original HDD.

- Power on and go to the BIOS. Select the HDD as bootable device. Save changes and exit.

[Piru]

@marcfrick2112

Do you have any recommendations as to HD brands?

I have 4 Seagate Barracuda 7200s (120, 200, 2 x 400 GB) and they are all totally silent. No problems so far, and all but 120GB have 5 year warranty. Ok, the warranty doesn't cover the dataloss if the drive should ever fail, but the fact the manufacturer is giving all their drives the 5 year warranty is quite assuring.

Whatever manufacturer / model drive you get, always at least try to backup your most important data regularily. Catastrophic HW failure is just one way to lose data, the filesystem can get corrupted or files can be deleted by accident.

Regarding buying 3rd party HDDs (ebay or not): I personally wouldn't do that. There is no way of knowing what condition the drive is at, it could fail the next week and seller is long gone by then.