The last day or so I have been hearing chirps and squeals from my computer. Worring that I may be near a failure, I want to replace the hard drives. The system is a Dell Dimension 8300, P4 3.2 ghz, 3 gig ram, GeForce 7800GS. I have 3 hard drives. C=Seagate ST380011A, 40 gig, 7200rpm. D=Western Didital WD400BB, 80 gig, 7200rpm and E=Iomega HDS72808 an 80 gig USB external for some backup. I lost a primary drive years ago and don't want to go through that again. So, with the system going on 4 years, I thought it might be wise to replace the internal drives before one dies. What would be a logical purchase considering I would want good performance and quality? And how do I go about transferring data. Thanks for any replies.Michael

Doubtful that you will be able to do this on your Dell, but really the only way to go to protect against a single-point failure (ie, lost HDD) is to go with a mirrored drives on a RAID 1 configuration.I lost a WD100 once that had everything on it. Never again. I now keep data on twin SATA 120's. There is still risk of loss due to virus, fire, theft, etc, however the failure of a single drive won't take you down.If I were building from scratch, I would either run twin 10k SATAs on in a RAID 1 and then configure those into two separate logical drives - C: O/S and D: Data. Or I would run a single 10k for O/S and applications and then a separate 7200 RAID 1 pair for data.Whether you keep data on separate logical or physical drives, I would always suggest that you keep it on a separate partition than what your O/S is on. I even go so far as to map "My Documents" to the D: drive. It makes it so much easier to do a clean install of the O/S if something goes ape.For now, I'd back up anything valuable to CD/DVD.BTW, squeals are usually fans going bad. Drives either buzz or go silent.

I use Norton Ghost to backup my primary drive on a regular basis. You can write the backup to CDs or DVDs, and restore your system to where it was before the failure.

If you've experienced a hard drive failure in the past, you know how important it is to back up immediately if you think you have a problem. Drives sometimes give a warning before going bad and sometimes they don't, either way, backup, backup, backup!Like KPDX ATC said, it could very well be a fan. I use a piece of tygon tubing as a stethescope to try to determine the source of the noise.