Recommended HDDs?

[ianm2]

I am currently using a samsung spinpoint after a glowing review.

It does the job, its quiet enuff(not silent, but I don't think any are), its been reliable, but doesn't seem very fast, its sata 300, and I am rather disappointed, I don't know if its just normal speed, or just that other ata ones would be painfully slow.

Anyway, any other recommendations?, maxtor seem to be a bit hit and miss, but there is a 5yr warranttee on the sata2, and is the wd raptor worth the cash?

finally, anywhere I can find out about raid?

my mobo is an asus sli premium, NF4 chipset, that occasionally alternates with a dfi lanparty expert.

thanks

[jonnyGURU]

http://www.storagereview.com

[Oklahoma Wolf]

Personally I don't really care for anything Samsung, but I've had nothing but good experiences with Western Digital, Seagate, and Maxtor. Actually running one from each company right now, though the only one that's relatively new is the 200gb SATA Maxtor (bought in January of '05).

My WD is an old 45gb - it's the only one I have left that's a Deer survivor, though it is in fact the third RMA replacement for the original WD450AA the Deer killed. Must be six years old by now and counting :)

Used to like Fujitsu way back when, before they started to decline in quality. Still have a pile of old Fujitsus that still work from 1.6gb to 4.3gb.

[burebista]

Raptor or Seagate 7200.10 if you want fast drives, Samsung Spinpoint T if you want a quiet one, or WD KS/YS as a mixture of those. :)
A couple of days ago I choose an WD 2500KS and I'm happy with it, but I'm somehow a WD fan. :D

[ianm2]

WEll well, thanks to jonnys link it does appear the spinpoint is slower than the rest, it is very reliable and quiet and does its job, which is all you can say.

[EsaT]

Raptor or Seagate 7200.10 if you want fast drivesSeagate 7200.10 is fast only when data is read sequentially, if data is read from multiple locations across disk (more than one program accessing HD) its performance is something abysmal.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/seagate-barra-720010_14.html
(hopefully they'll add Maxtor's caching system to top of their high raw STR on next serie)

Samsung Spinpoint T if you want a quiet oneAnd want to soft mount it.
Our usual recommendation to soft-mount any desktop drive goes double for the Spinpoint T: Its vibration level was very high, and a low 120 Hz hum could sometimes be heard even when the drive was placed on foam.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article657-page3.html
(even higher capacity four platter WD fares better)


What experience I and my friends have can be said shortly, Seagate and WD seems to be most reliable, Maxtor worst. Samsung is little question mark, one of my friends had two of them, until other started producing errors, propably because getting cooked up by other HD being tightly next to it.
But regardless of brand backupping important data is must!

BTW, One good habit when buying new HD would be keeping it just running and testing it for some time, first hours/days are point where any manufacturing defects/transport mishandling would propably show.

[burebista]

Thanks EsaT for xbitlabs link. Somehow I've missed that in the past.
I've read about Samsung on SPCR.
That's why I said:
A couple of days ago I choose an WD 2500KS and I'm happy with it, but I'm somehow a WD fan.;)

[templar_m1a1]

Any suggestions for a laptop Hard Drive?

I have a e-machines M6810 that currently has a 60Gb Fujitsu (5400rpm) ATA6 type interface and I was thinking on replacing it with 100Gb Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 (7200rpm).

Ideas?

[Fibbles]

I tend to use Western Digital for speed and relability and Samsung for silence and reliability. Samsung has new drives with 16mb of cache out and I want a pair for my external USB backup thingies.

Maxtor's tend to die on me :(

For laptops, I like Western Digital's Scorpio and/or Seagate's Momentus, but I don't know much about laptop drives aside from those 2 (upgraded my sisters laptop from a 40gb to an 80gb 5400 RPM ATA6 Scorpio).

[SuperSix]

Samsung hard drives may not be the FASTEST, but as said above, they are quiet and reliable. I sell a LOT of hard drives, ans Samsung is no worse or better than any other brand in regards to reliability.

And that brings me to another thing:
Which brand HDD is more reliable than another? My answer - none. Manufacturing ability has gotten to the point where failures across ALL brands is rare, and no one manufacturer is statistically worse than another, on a large scale.

I sell a lot of Seagate because of the 5 year warranty, but c'mon, 3 years from now, I'll bet that drive is a brick or under a monitor doing leveling duties.

I run Maxtor and Hitachi(IBM) drives, <gasp!> and all run great.

Case in point:
Mention Hitachi (IBM) to anyone, (that's been in the business), and they will say: "You gotta be kidding me - I had 4.25819 of them die during the "Deathstar" days, and will never use them again!"

Guess what.. If you do research, you will see that before the "Deathstar" incident, IBM hard drives were some of the fastest, best made hard drives on the market. They had one bad run (And bad it indeed was), and the press was so bad, they sold the division to Hitachi. Now - they are a huge OEM supplier, I continue to sell them, and the returns are extremely low.

What is comes down to is that most hard drive (and other hardware) opinions are based on old, outdated issues that may have cropped up before, and taint the opinions of those that are looked upon for advice.

In other words, unless you have hands-on experience with a LOT of said hardware, you opinion is just that, but not one that can be called an educated opinion.

IMO,
Mark

[SuperSix]

Any suggestions for a laptop Hard Drive?

I have a e-machines M6810 that currently has a 60Gb Fujitsu (5400rpm) ATA6 type interface and I was thinking on replacing it with 100Gb Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 (7200rpm).

Ideas?

That will net you a pretty good increase in performance, by simply going from 5400 to 7200RPM.

Brands are somewhat insignificant, but not many mobile manufacturers make 7200 RPM drives, I belive your choices will be limited to Seagate or Hitachi.

Beware - going to a 7200 RPM drive will impact your battery life.

[templar_m1a1]

Thanks Fibbles and SuperSix, I will do a bit more "digging" around for 7200 RPM hard drive. I am not worried about battery life since it is being used more as a portable PC with 2Gb of RAM :D.

( I get about 2 hours, and I don't feel like taking this thing apart, again :wall:, to swap out Athlon for Turino CPU)

[uOpt]

I generally buy Seagate.

I'm in the Maxtor hating camp since a couple Diamondmax9 dumped on me, including taking down a raid-5 by failing two disks fast enough one after another to not allow me to get all data off. Seems they were sensitive to power fluctuations, I found more people with the same kind of take-down.

WD often screws up the firmware on their drives, then patches it in Windows drivers. Doesn't work too well for me under Linux and FreeBSD.

Hitachi I have a couple buy they are just meh. I was particularly disappointed in my 7200 notebook drive which is much slower than I expected.

Fujitsu I always liked. I don't have one right now (non-SCSI) but it will probably the next thing to buy if Seagate screws up.

[uOpt]

Seagate 7200.10 is fast only when data is read sequentially, if data is read from multiple locations across disk (more than one program accessing HD) its performance is something abysmal.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/seagate-barra-720010_14.html
(hopefully they'll add Maxtor's caching system to top of their high raw STR on next serie)


This is very likely to be specific to Xbitlab's benchmarks. They even mention that the Seagates don't do enough readahead, which means their benchmarks would benefit from readahead.

I would hate to see a hardware vendor change the firmware/cache and do more readahead. It should be the OS'es decision to do readahead or not, and from there even the application can control it. The OS level cache is entirely sufficient for this, there is nothing to be gained from moving readahead into the disk.

Too much readahead will wreck other benchmarks, of course.

[ianm2]

I always get the impression maxtor are a slightly poorer relation to WD and seagate, perhaps as in the motherboard analogy for say ecs and asus.

I have a maxtor, and it was a bit noisy, but I never had a problem with it, I guess I have been lucky so far, all my hd's have been ok and did their job without trouble. But I do always wonder about maxtors....even so I think they are giving 5 yrs warrantee on some, which is reassuring??

[Baron]

I run a 120GB Maxtor (about 2 and a half years old) 2 x 37GB Raptors - Raid0 (about a year and a half old) and a 250GB WD (which is about a year old) and so far no problems with either makes.
The little Raptors are the noisiest in the bunch though.

[XBarbarian]

Great informed post SuperSix, I have 7 years experience in support at various enterprises in the bay area , not in retail, but I have seen relatively the same failure rate across the board of manufacturers, which isn't all that uncommon.

I just ordered a new Maingear F131 rig, frankly cause I'm lazy now and have more money, so I decided to let a boutique build it and make sure it works outta the box, plus all the freakin wiring I hate.. anyway..

chose 2x 150 raptors and a 500gb 16mb sta 2 wd for data

The raptors remain the speed kings, and in a 0 stripe should be gtg~

the rest of the specs are 6700 oc, 2gb corsair 1066, 8800gtx, on a Nvidia Nforce 680i board. Allegedly the p23 bios patch resolved the issues with that board, and if it hasn't, well, the other bene's of buying a boutique rig, are warranty =^.^=