My laptop computer recently had its hard drive start dying and now it will no longer successfully boot. I've been without my computer for over a month now, but I want to get it fixed and the only way to do that is to get a new drive. What are the best kind of hard drives to buy if I'm going to buy it myself or should I give it to a computer technician to fix, though I'll have to bare extra costs for the service?
Well, it's better to buy a new Hard Drive if you can afford one right now. Technician isn't going to help much except for retrieving your data fro your old Hard Drive.
I partly agree with @wowtpg but I have reservations. Repairing is a short term and dangerous solution. Don't do that. Once a hard disk is opened its efficiency reduces by over 70%. What your laptop is saying is "Its time to replace me". If I were you, I would sell the laptop now that it's still booting at least. Or give someone as a gift and just buy a new one. A tired hard drive is a sign of a tired machine. Consider replacing.
We are in the same boat. My hard drive is already acting up and very slow. It takes 5 minutes to boot and accessing a website takes 30 seconds to fully display the webpage. Based on my analysis, it is the hard drive because it is emitting a noise already when writing or when accessing a big file. My choice is a Seagate although there are expensive brands that I think is okay. Maybe I will use the new hard drive as the system disk and make this present drive as secondary disk.
When a hard drive starts clicking already, the disk has bad sectors already and it needs to be replaced. To anticipate when the hard drive will go bad, use a hard disk health analyzer software like Hard Disk Sentinel, it evaluates your disk for free. From my experience, a 50% disk health means that it will go bad anytime. In my case it has been corrupted 3x already.
These days I would just be more inclined to go and get a new machine versus trying to do the piecemeal repairs. That is just me, though, but I suppose if you know your stuff maybe you can salvage what you have.
I think what you can do is go to the service center. And get your hard drive checked. This way you can easily fix the hard drive. And find out if there any thing that you can do from your side. Usually laptop hard drive if in warranty it can be fixed. But not a lot of people are making use of the warranty options. So that's something people need to see as well.
There are a few companies that can recover data from your hard drive, if that is what you want, but I've heard it costs a lot. Otherwise, hard drive is one of the few things you can easily replace in a laptop, and hard drives are pretty cheap as well. You could also invest in an SSD. Those have limited read/write cycles, but should otherwise be more durable. They are also quite a bit faster than typical 5400 rpm laptop hard drives.
