A new hard drive

For some reason, while I was chatting on the internet checking out my regular websites and listening to iTunes, my hard drive started clicking and beeping intermittently. after about 20 seconds, everthing went a bit funny and I tried to close all my windows and shut down the computer but it froze strangely and then the blue fatal error screen came up. so I turned the computer off and started it up again. It was much much much slower to start up than before and itunes doesn't work any more, it just asks me to send an error report when I try to open it. I scheduled checkdisk to run at the next start up and restarted. Check disk didn't find anything wrong. Then I got a computer expert in. He did the same thing and found 24kb of bad sectors, which is apparently the magic number which signifies a faulty hard drive. Of course, my lovely expensive computer is out of warranty. Teaches me to ignore the warnings about dell.

In short, I need to get a nice new reliable hard drive (and I mean really reliable because this is a household with 3 kids and the computer's hardly ever off!) to replace this one. I was wondering if someone here could suggest some good ones. I need one probably at very least 80Gb and at most 160Gb, ideally probably about 120Gb and compatable with the 4 pin SATA connector. If there's just a hard drive manufacturer you can reccomend for reliable hard drives then please share

Thankyou

 

Seagate and Maxtor seem to be the most liked, and apparently they are both reasonably reliable.

www.seagate.com
www.maxtor.com

 

Actually, the magic number here is "anything greater than zero".

IDE drives use "sector sparing" -- the manufacturers design the drive with spare sectors. The drive can also identify a sector that's going bad, and will move data on a flawed sector to a spare sector -- and maintains a remapping table so that it can find that data in its new location when it's called for. The process is entirely transparent to the user.

If CHKDSK or SCANDISK shows bad sectors, that means the drive has run out of spare sectors. That should not normally happen within the design lifetime of the drive. When it does happen, you can expect the number of bad sectors to increase rapidly. Data on a sector that goes bad often cannot be recovered without special (and expensive) techniques -- if it can be recovered at all.