I don't think that graph bodes well for the future really. Before you always had choice and people knew where the fastest or most reliable HDDs were coming from at any one time because there was enough competition to make it worthwhile for each company to focus on a selling point to be the best at whether it be reliability, quietness, speed, economy, etc. It's all a numbers game now and reliability seems to be an afterthought.

I'd pay double current prices for a HDD that I knew wouldn't wear out within two years...

I take it solid state drives are still prohibitively expensive?

You could buy an enterprise grade drive you know, there's plenty of models about. But yes, they are about double the price. You want to look at Seagate Constellation drives or the Western Digital RE range (they have a 5 year warranty I think).

Solid state isn't prohibitively expensive but capacities are still low and it's not a good choice of backup medium. Decent HDD + cloud/external drive is your best bet I think.

Was going to go for a Crucial M4 SSD but I'll take your advice.

I'm at the mercy of PC World as I need to be up and running by tonight but at least my local has a business centre - I'll take a look there.

If they have more than one model actually in stock I'll be stunned!!!... 

What's the actual volume of data you're talking about? If you were going to buy an SSD it would make much more sense to have that as the windows boot drive so it's nice and fast and use another drive for backup purposes/data store. I have less than 10Gb in work/client files (which is surprising to me actually) so I could put them on my SSD if I wanted and duplicate them on my regular HDDs, but it makes more sense to have it all backed up from regular HDD anyway and not to fill the SSDs. No one really knows yet how long some of these SSDs will last especially with frequent write wear, controllers seem to be the issue with them. In another few years they might be ideal for backup purposes though.

Good luck bending over for PC World though, I can't imagine they will be cheap if they have any in stock!

It's purely for the boot drive (C:\)

Current one is 500Gb which caters for Vista and Program files with about 100Gb to spare.

nobody made hard drives like quantum. Their 850mb & 3.2gb fireballs probably 2 of the best drives ever, along with the 6.4gb. Seagate gobbled them up & managed to sort out their high failure rate a few years afterwards.

Ended up buying a Samsung 840 SSD as it was either that or a poxy 5400rpm caviar HDD... Wish I hadn't now.

This is not going well. It's unbelievably slow - takes about two minutes to boot up on a fresh Vista64 install and it frequently appears to hang for long periods of time during Windows Update. Have I got some settings in BIOS wrong?

Running on ACHI.

Now got the 'BOOTMGR missing' message again.

I'll take it back tomorrow and just get a normal HDD. 

There's something seriously wrong here I feel. When trying to access my data drive I *occaisionally* get an Explorer hang for about two minutes. Could it be something to do with a faulty controller?  I doubt it as research suggests BOOTMGR error can only be a hard drive problem... Vista install was desperately slow though - about 90 minutes.

Any ideas?

try pulling the faulty HDD & see if your machine runs better. Dodgy HDD can seriously slow down your machine

What Egg said - it could still be trying to install the boot sector on the duff drive and not the new one. Best off pulling out the old drive altogether to eliminate it as a potential fault - if you're still getting issues I can promise you its not the SSD and its probably the HDD controller at fault (or a very remotely possibility dodgy RAM is causing write corruption, though that wouldn't explain the slow speed).

I always install with a single hard drive installed so it's not that.  Even with my data drive out, Windows install took about 90 minutes.  That's not right.

Gah.... this is all I need right now. 

As I don't have the time to rebuild the system myself, what's the best place to go to for system builds these days?

I think you'd do just as well finding a local independant that can take a look at it today as you might get it fixed by this afternoon, unless you meant buying a new system completely?

Yeah,  was just thinking of a new system less probably the graphics card.

To be honest, I have trust issues with giving my system over to 'techs' and I wouldn't be able to get it to them until next week anyway.

I'm also reading that having floppy support enabled in BIOS can cripple a system (I had reset the BIOS to default before the reinstall) but that wouldn't explain the 'Explorer not responding' issues I had prior to this.  I just can't tell which drive is having the issue (although C:\ is very slow with D:\ disconnected) or if it's a cable/controller problem.

People are also suggesting changing out the cables (both SATA and power) but let's be honest are they really likely to fail?  I could be chasing my tail forever and still not find the fault.

It could be a SATA cable issue (power cables don't fail, they either power or don't), its an easy thing to try swapping over and checking just to eliminate it. You probably have some spares about that came with your motherboard so its worth a shot.