Hard drive recommendations...? 1

[sunny3]

Hi

What are your views on the best harddrives ie makes models etc

I have always favoured "Ibm" who I guess now are "Hitachi" are these still the best...?

Have also had 3 "maxtor" drives die on me in the past.

After reading up is the new thing to go for ide/sata 7200rpm 8 mb cache and low access time 9ms-

Cheers.

 

[paparazi]

Best Mainstream 7,200rpm drive (as voted by Toms Hardware) is the new Hitachi 7K250 range, unfortunately many will warn you off IBM/Hitachi because of the "Deathstar" fiasco of 2001 and the high failure rates with the GXP60/75 range.
Trouble is mud sticks and many users have just abandoned IBM/Hitachi even though the problems are well since sorted.
I have a SATA 160GB 7K250 and am very impressed.
Seagate Barracuda's are also a personal favourate of mine, they are the quietest of all HDD's with impecable reliability if only average performance.

The new Samsung Spinpoint range is the "value winner" offering reliability and excellent capacity/Dollar ratio.

Ultimate desktop performance goes to Western Digital's 10,000rpm Raptor range but they are expensive and sizes are limited to 36/72GB.
Large capacity goes to Western Digital Caviar range upto 250GB.
Martin

Replying helps further our knowledge, without comment leaves us wondering.

 

[sunny3]

Thanks for the info...

 

[adzy31]

I would definitely not recommend the Maxtor drives - as you said, the reliability is a big issue. After having my 40 gig maxtor drive die on me prematurely I foolishly bought a DiamondMax Plus 9 120GB ATA/133 internal hard drive. The only thing it does well is fry my fingers when i try and touch it. Seriously... that thing gets HOT. Straight out of the box the drive got about 3% into Verifying in fdisk, at which point the drive must have got too hot, and it clicked loudly, and has just refused to work since. Not happy i'm thinking I can only exchange this for another maxtor drive when really I'm after one of those Seagate Barracuda drives mentioned up there.

One thing that really pees me off is hard drives that reckon they can randomly decide to forget to work one day, therefore screwing all your years of files. [How come the most relied upon piece of hardware is still based on unreliable mechanical delicate spinning chunks of metal? Roll on holographic storage...] Will any drive with Barracuda in the name be guaranteed to be nice&reliable? Or could you recommend one solely on reliability? I'm not planning to spend crazy money... but anything in the same/similar price range?

Any help you can offer would be gratefully recieved.
Adam

 

[cdogg]

How come the most relied upon piece of hardware is still based on unreliable mechanical delicate spinning chunks of metal? Roll on holographic storage...

Good question. Typically, the biggest factor keeping them alive is cost. Any other solution would rely on more expensive technology, which does exist but of course is only targeted for corporate environments. Drives that operate on a combination of Flash and RAM will be available before you know it, as well as a slew of other technologies that are just around the corner.

Losing data can be countered by frequent backups. It's a pain, but a backup every now and then can't hurt too bad.

~cdogg
[tab]"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind";
[tab][tab]- Aristotle
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884

 

[paparazi]

Well I guess no one can gaurantee reliability, all I can say is we have had far fewer returns of barracuda's than any other make bar none.
The latest 7200.7 range (been out nearly a year now) seem to be following the same reliable and quiet trend.
We havn't had any experience (as of yet) with the large platter Barracuda's but have no reason to suppose that they will be any less reliable.
Martin

Start by questioning and soon you will be anwering.
So please take but remember to return and give when you can.