Author Topic: Hard Drive reccomendations  (Read 1223 times)

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Offline karajorma

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Hard Drive reccomendations
Well I'm planning to take a certification exam this week so as usual my main PC decides that now is a good time to develop technical problems and kill a hard drive (Last time I took one my power supply fried itself).

Fortunately it was basically the drive I used for movies and TV programs downloaded from the net so I've lost nothing except a few sleepless nights while I leave my PC running XNews, emule and bitTorrent.

However with the drive gone I'm facing some severe storage problems and I need to buy a new HD to replace it pretty sharpish. I've currently got a free slot on my primary channels where this drive lived and a SATA channel free. But I've not got a huge amount of cash to spare so SATA is probably out.

Basically I'm wondering what everyone is reccomending these days.
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Offline Admiral LSD

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Hard Drive reccomendations
I've had a 120GB/8Mb cache WD Caviar in this system since I built it and it's still going strong. If I were to build a new system today, I'd probably go with one of the Seagate SATA drives. Depending on capacity, they aren't much more expensive than regular IDE ones, at least not in this country.
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Offline karajorma

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Hard Drive reccomendations
Quote
Originally posted by Admiral LSD
I've had a 120GB/8Mb cache WD Caviar in this system since I built it and it's still going strong.


That's exactly the drive that blew up on me! Just suddenly stopped working while windows was running and locked up the PC. Then it started making a weird clicking noise and prevented the primary master from showing up in BIOS (Even with the power disconnected. I had to physically disconnect the IDE cable to get it back).
« Last Edit: August 02, 2005, 05:28:29 pm by 340 »
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Offline Admiral LSD

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Hard Drive reccomendations
Well, this ones been going for two years now. I haven't treated it particularly well, either. I've had it going almost 24/7 during that time not to mention that this year, I've been dragging it up home every few weeks because my folks don't yet have a DVD burner (I've been using their ADSL connection to, um, "aquire" certain things).
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Offline Taristin

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Hard Drive reccomendations
I have a 160 GB / 8mb buffer SATA Seagate Barracuda. I loooove it. It's the best HDD I've ever used, so far. Fast, ultra reliable, so far, and, well, fast. XP installed on it in 16 minutes.
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Offline vyper

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Hard Drive reccomendations
I have 5GB left free on my Seagate 160GB IDE drive...

New drive or just keep using DVD-Rs?
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Offline Kosh

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Hard Drive reccomendations
Quote
Originally posted by vyper
I have 5GB left free on my Seagate 160GB IDE drive...

New drive or just keep using DVD-Rs?



New drive, IMO.


Let me guess, you are one of those people who never deletes anything. Am I right? :D
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Offline Martinus

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Hard Drive reccomendations
[color=66ff00]Yeah DVD-R's have been shockingly bad quality of late. I've heard horror stories of the things degrading after a few months.
[/color]

 

Offline vyper

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Hard Drive reccomendations
Bugger, there goes my next night out.
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Offline CP5670

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Hard Drive reccomendations
This has been my experience...

IBM 75GXP 75GB (ATA-100, 7200RPM, 2MB): a deathstar, worked well for two years and then died slowly over a period of two months. It still works occasionally if I plug it in, although it now has an extremely loud vacuum cleaner like bearing noise that can be heard around the house.

Seagate 120GB (ATA-100, 7200RPM, 8MB): worked for about two weeks, then simply refused to be detected by the IDE controller. No idea what happened, but I just returned it for a refund.

Maxtor DM9 160GB (ATA-133, 7200RPM, 8MB): worked for about a year. Started acting weird at one point and the computer kept hanging during any disk access for a while; one day I just got a bunch of SMART errors when loading up windows. Lost all my PI campaign stuff and never managed to recover much from it.

Maxtor DM9 200GB (ATA-133, 7200RPM, 8MB): replacement for above drive that is working well so far, used in my main box. It's been about six months. The actual size is 203GB and about 89GB is used up. Most of the crap belongs to my brother though. Runs 24/7.

Some old Mac 160MB SCSI disk: still going strong after 15 years. That is what I call high quality. Slow as hell by today's standards though.

Quantum Bigfoot TS 19GB (ATA-33, 4000RPM, 2MB): weird looking 5.25" drive. Have had it for 7 years and never had a single problem. Currently used in my backup / retro game machine.


Anyway, I would say just get any 160GB 7200RPM 8MB cache drive. The 160GB models cost about $70-80, are pretty fast and seem to have the best price/capacity ratio at the moment. There are some faster/bigger drives out there, like the Maxtor 300GB 16MB cache disk (would be my choice if I was buying now), the 74GB Raptor and the Hitachi 500GB, but those all cost considerably more. SATA drives are only about $4 more than PATA ones, but at the same time they don't have any inherent advantages apart from cleaner cables. Last I checked Seagate had a longer warranty on their consumer drives than the other major companies, although that doesn't necessarily mean they are more reliable. I don't think any of the major manufacturers is really any more reliable than the others.

That was a long post, but I needed something to do while I was waiting for this graph render to finish. :p
« Last Edit: August 02, 2005, 11:24:53 pm by 296 »

 

Offline Bobboau

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Hard Drive reccomendations
"Some old Mac 160MB SCSI disk:"
you still have this pluged in!?

and does anyone make disks with more than an 8 MB cache?
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Offline Admiral LSD

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Hard Drive reccomendations
If you read his post fully, you'll notice he mentions a Maxtor with a 16MB cache :p

I have a Mac LC475 kicking around with an old 250MB SCSI disk in it. It worked last time I booted it up, it should still be working now.

Also, if you're buying SATA then, to my knowledge, Seagate manufacture the only "true" SATA drives on the market, the rest are just PATA drives with SATA adaptor chips added to them. SATA's been around for a while though, so that may very well have changed.
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Offline CP5670

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Hard Drive reccomendations
Quote
Some old Mac 160MB SCSI disk:"
you still have this pluged in!?

and does anyone make disks with more than an 8 MB cache?


It's in the Mac it came in. :D Games those days were really small though, so I have about 30 of them on the disk along with various other applications and only 100MB is used up. I still have this computer in service and load up some of the old classics every now and then (it shares a monitor with my other older computer).

Maxtor has one with a 16MB cache buffer that I mentioned there. That actually looks like quite a good drive, with performance that is generally very close to that of a Raptor but with a much larger capacity. It's only about $20 more than a normal 8MB drive of the same capacity.

 

Offline karajorma

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Hard Drive reccomendations
Quote
Originally posted by CP5670
Some old Mac 160MB SCSI disk: still going strong after 15 years. That is what I call high quality. Slow as hell by today's standards though.


I've got one of those. Every once in a while I get this crazy idea about plgging my SCSI card into my second machine which only has 128MB RAM and moving the swap to it just to see what the speed difference would be :D
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Offline Scuddie

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Hard Drive reccomendations
If you want a hard drive where dependability is top priority, get a samsung.  If you want a hard drive where there are many features, yet dependable enough to last three solid years, get a Hitachi.  Samsung drives, like most of their products, cost a bit more but are top-tier in reliability.  Hitachi had a so-so reputation, but they cleaned up their act a couple years ago and have since been making fast, quiet, and stable drives with the best technology.  Much better than the mainstream drives, such as Maxtor or Western Digital.

In my machine, I have a 160GB Samsung 1640N drive, which I have been using for a good three years.  It has survived four power spikes, as well as a soft head crash.  It runs just as well as it did when I bought it.  In my friend's machine is a 200GB Hitachi Deskstar, which is eerily quiet and never overheats.  When compared to my drive, it is considerably faster, but I dont know if it can handle the kind of abuse that I put my systems thru.

Anyway, it's a personal preference of mine to continue using PATA, because although the SATA interface may be standardized, the SATA controller is not.  And until it is, I am happy with PATA.
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Offline karajorma

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Hard Drive reccomendations
Well this drive isn't ever going to be the system or boot disk ever so the fact that SATA drivers aren't standardised isn't a huge problem as the OS will be loading the drivers on boot from elsewhere anyway.

I only want this drive for storage. My system disk in a PATA drive in a rack precisely so that if it ever develops a problem I can have a new boot disk in there after only the turn of a key and a reboot.

I've heard good things about Samsung drives (in fact I have one in the machine at the moment). Same goes for Hitachi. I've heard about as much bad about Western Digital as good so given the fact that I've not gotten a single reccomendation for them WD are out of the running :)

I guess the choices are Seagate if I go SATA and one of those two if I go PATA.

Anyone got a good reccomendation for a good UK mail order? I've used overclockers before and generally been happy with them but I'm always happy to look around :)
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Offline Admiral LSD

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Hard Drive reccomendations
http://gentoox.shallax.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=456

^^heh, I'm not sure I'd trust Samsung drives after reading a story like that...
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Offline karajorma

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Hard Drive reccomendations
You could probably find similar stories about any HD manufacturer. In fact WD is the manufacturer that I have heard the largest number of bad things about.
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Hard Drive reccomendations
Quote
Originally posted by Maeglamor
[color=66ff00]Yeah DVD-R's have been shockingly bad quality of late. I've heard horror stories of the things degrading after a few months.
[/color]


At this point the only brand of DVDRs that are good and will last are Taiyo Yudens.  They cost a few more cents per disc but worth every penny.



As for hard drives, Seagates comes with 5 year warranties for the win.

Maxtor now has a 3 year warranty again and have the most quiet drives so they're not bad either.

 

Offline Scuddie

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Hard Drive reccomendations
Taiyo Yuden and Ritek are the only ones that were EVER worth buying.  It's a shame to know that G04s are better than G05s, though.
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