Seagate slapped with class action lawsuit over hard drive failure rate

CrystalDiskInfo is also useful (go for standard edition - portable). In particular look at reallocated sector counts. I've got a number of Seagates getting quite old now and reallocated sector counts is zero for all of them (touch wood). They are all 1TB.
I buy WDs now but they could also fail at any moment. I still buy only 1 or 2TB HDDs - spreads the risk.

Indeed 1tb is plenty big enough :)

mjf said:

CrystalDiskInfo is also useful (go for standard edition - portable). In particular look at reallocated sector counts. I've got a number of Seagates getting quite old now and reallocated sector counts is zero for all of them (touch wood). They are all 1TB.
I buy WDs now but they could also fail at any moment. I still buy only 1 or 2TB HDDs - spreads the risk.

ThrashZone said:

Indeed 1tb is plenty big enough :)

There's nothing wrong or unsafe with larger drive sizes as long as you have adequate backups.

iSuck said:

It's amazing how you can buy a 1 TB HDD for $50 now.

Unless you live in Canada.

iSuck said:

It's amazing how you can buy a 1 TB HDD for $50 now.

It's quite amazing to me since I paid $500 for my first hdd in 1986, a 20MB Seagate ST-225.

Looks ok. Windows should be automatically defragmenting but you could check.
CrystalDiskMark (same link as CrystalDiskInfo) should give you some speed benchmarks. If the speed looks ok then maybe you are loading a lot of unnecessary software at startup. Look at msconfig.exe -> startup.