[Col. Fishguts]

Yesterday, my beloved Maxtor Diamond 60 GB hard disk passed away, after 2 and a half years of extensive use. It didn't give up without a fight though. In a heroic struggle for survival it let me acces 2 out of 3 partitions although it already was mortally wounded and making violent noises, and thus let me backup all vital data. For that it earned my deep respect.

I believe it is in a better place now, where there are no head crashes, magnets, power outages or corrupt data. There it shall be reunited with it's fellow data storages, and may they exchange bytes happily until the end of days.

R.I.P.  my old comrade


So...now that the dead a mourned, what should I get for a replacement ?
All HD manufacturers claim their drives to be reliable and long living, but whom to trust ?
What are the popolar believes here, which HDs live the longest ? (i need a IDE ATA-133 type HD, btw)
So, enlighten me with your wisdom....

[silverwolf]

i don't know much about hard drives.but the one i've been using is going on 4 years now. I think you should stick with what works. i'll have to find out what mine is so if you don't want to stick with the same one that just died you have somewhere to go

EDIT: mines a seagate ST360020A but i don't think its the right type

[Lonestar]

Originally posted by Col. Fishguts
Yesterday, my beloved Maxtor Diamond 60 GB hard disk passed away, after 2 and a half years of extensive use. It didn't give up without a fight though. In a heroic struggle for survival it let me acces 2 out of 3 partitions although it already was mortally wounded and making violent noises, and thus let me backup all vital data. For that it earned my deep respect.

I believe it is in a better place now, where there are no head crashes, magnets, power outages or corrupt data. There it shall be reunited with it's fellow data storages, and may they exchange bytes happily until the end of days.

R.I.P.  my old comrade


So...now that the dead a mourned, what should I get for a replacement ?
All HD manufacturers claim their drives to be reliable and long living, but whom to trust ?
What are the popolar believes here, which HDs live the longest ? (i need a IDE ATA-133 type HD, btw)
So, enlighten me with your wisdom....

2 Raptor 10000 RPM drives RAIDED is what i would pick.

[kasperl]

I love the obituary bit, I think I'd saving it somewhere.

[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]Huzzah O stalwart device!

Personally I've seen little that compares to Maxtors, had a fujitsu give up the ghost after 3 months and Deskstars have a patchy history. Some Toshiba's have a poor record too. One Maxtor lasted 5 years, would probably still be going if I hadn't killed it

Got me 2 80gig Maxtors a while back, affordable, reliable stuff.
[/color]

[Grey Wolf]

Originally posted by Lonestar


2 Raptor 10000 RPM drives RAIDED is what i would pick.

He'd need a SATA card to pull that off. I'd suggest an 80GB from either Maxtor, Western Digital, Hitachi, or Seagate.

[Col. Fishguts]

I thought about a RAID setup as well, but using 50% of the space for backup-only seems a bit like a waste. A smaller secondary HD for vital data backup seems more reasonable to me.
Had bad experiences with Wesern Digital, but the Seagates seem to be tough (have an old 2.5 GB which is about 5 years old now and still kicking), but hard to find around here recently and rather expensive.

[Grey Wolf]

The RAID setup that he was suggesting you use is RAID 0, which in truth really isn't a RAID setup. You get the full capacity, and approximately double the speed, but at the cost of losing it all if one drive crashes.

[pyro-manic]

Maxtor all the way for me! Got a 160gig SATA150 to go in the new puter, but you can get 'em in PATA flavours as well. The 80/120gig ones are pretty damn cheap now, so get a couple of them.

[Kosh]

I always use Western Digital. I wouldn't bother wasting money on an SATA drive (and controller card) unless you have a chipset that can actually use the bandwidth (most do not).