Okay so I came home the other day and both of my hard drives on my secondary IDE channel were missing. I use both of these hard drives mainly for data storage (movies, music, games (iso's etc) programs and such).
The hard drives were Western Digital, one was a 250Gb (still good) and the other one was a 320Gb I bought from newegg about 3 years ago. When I find my camera I'll try and get some pictures.
But anyways, to replace that hard drive and start over, I was thinking about getting these

for primary disk (windows etc)
Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200AAKS 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

storage
Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

I don't know, I don't imagine this is a very common thing, and it sucks a lot.

I lost so much music.
But would you guys recommend using that 500Gb for storage?
I kinda' want knew hard drives a lot now, I honestly don't know the age of the two I'm using at this moment.
It sucks losing so much data.

It wouldn't hurt to see if you could RMA the hard drive, just punch in the information at Western Digital's RMA form.

At three years it is slim to none, but you might be pleasantly surprised if you're still valid by a couple of weeks.

I think you're choices are good, but after losing so much data you might want to start looking into some kind of RAID array with data protection. I use RAID1 in my setup so if one drive goes down I have an exact copy on another drive.

Yeah, thanks a lot. Sorry to anyone who read for the ****ty posting but basically he just answered what I was asking. I don't know much at all about RAID setups and such, so yeah, thanks Hibiki. lol

You're other option is a back-up drive if your mobo doesn't support raid. Some are extremely easy to use, such as a "one-button back-up" solution. The other advantage of a external back-up drive is that it only runs when you turn it on. Since it doesn't start and stop everytime you boot up and/or it isn't constantly running, chances are that it will last longer.

I think it's a matter of comfort and price.

An external does have all the advantages that AntiM mentioned, but it might not be enough for some people's level of comfort. It still is a single drive and essentially a single point for failure.

RAID1 is two points of failure, meaning you could lose one and be fine, barring a lightning strike.

Post your specs and pricepoint so we can narrow down your options.

I once lost all of my crap. I had a hard-drive with about 3 years worth of my music production, unmastered recordings etc. It was my studio computer.

To make sure it doesn't happen again, I got two external drives. They're good for what they are, though a little bit slow when transfering files.

Hard-drives can randomly go whenever, without warning, but most of the time they do warn you with weird noises of reeeeaally bad, slow performance.

Then again, I bought a Seagate Baraccuda 320GB, and it squeeks all the time in hot weather >.> Only in real hot weather though. I'm keeping a close eye on it still.

Yeah, it was making noises sounding like it was starting and stopping mid-use (PC idling, gaming etc). I imagine it was that drive since it's gone now and the noise with it.

The motherboard I am currently on is an ECS P4M800Pro-m478.
Price isn't an issue, I've never been as angry as I was when I lost that HDD, I'll save as long as needed.

I had more music than I even knew on that drive, more movies, anime', T.V. series... all sorts of media.

I lost like 3 or 4 years of work. Everything I'd recorded, mixed, or produced to date in my studio as well as all my music, movies, photos etc..

Ouch, yeah man you got me beat by far.... I only had like, two or three albums that I had something to do with myself.

$1200 USD will pay for pulling data directly off of the platters through Seagate's own data recovery labs.

I know from a painful experience with a Maxtor.