Which HDD

[milgo]

Ok you've swung me withe colour

[directhex]

Anyone ever used a SAMSUNG 160GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive? The difference between the IDE and this SATA is about $13 U.S. Based on the conversation here I'm assuming that it is well worth it to go SATA in terms of speed correct?

i've got the 80gb ide version

all the samsungs, as well as maxtors & most of the western digitals & seagates use a serial ata to ide convertor chip, so there's no real speed difference - however, the sata drives are a lot easier to route around a case (being smaller), which is the main reason to go for them at the moment.

[drunkenmaster]

few things, mobo wise, i don't see why you'd say abit are more reliable than asus, i'd lean towards the other way being true but very little in it if anything. Better bios? don't see why, they clock the same, afaik as milgo says it has firewire and more ports, so more featured?


AS for sata/ide, right now people kidna talk about it in a misleading way liek sata drives are inherently faster. They aren't. The internals of any drive are the same, platters, spindle with read heads on, thats it. Its the same in any similar drive, teh sata or ide interface is just the transporting of data, you need different internal spindels that run faster or higher density platters to get more speed. Firmware is accountable for small differences in the sata/ide performance of the same make of drive running diff speeds. Also, even though maxtor diamond max 9+'s, and other drives are rated at a certain platter density, they can come with lower densities due to yeilds, some of the platter can be unreadable so you'll end up with diff drives, only ever so slightly different, but thats why the diffs.

Anyway, on to which drive to get, raptors, blisteringly fast? not really, marginally faster yes, 10k spindle, true, awful platter density, correct. In teh same way clocks per instruction and Mhz on a cpu make it fast or not, you need both platter density to be high and spindle to be fast to get great performance, so the raptor really balances it out so its only slightly faster, with a huge price premium partially(mainly maybe?) due ot he 5 yr warranty. My advice is to not waste the cash.

Drive wise, seagates only carry 1 year warranties which just kinda gets to me, and are slower than the other brands so i don't recommend them. Maxtor dm9+'s are the fastest(ignoring raptors) you can get, good value and pretty damned quiet. they carry 3 year warranties on any drives incluing 8meg cache that are 120gigs or more in size. 160gigs will HAVE to have two full 80gb density platters so you garentee that, and get best value added to 3 year warranty, thats my choice and recommendation. the other drives sub 120gig with any amount of cache carry a 1 year warranty.

WD SE drives are very good also, though louder(even my new liquid bearing one) than maxtors and a little slower(the liquid bearing i'm convinced is set to quiet mode as its scoring 30k in sisoft and low on other benchies). Though all WD SE drives, thats the oens with 8meg cache, carry 3 year warranty , but 2meg ones again have just one year warranties.


Hitachi drives are also very goo, 180 or 250GXP models, both good value, fast, i'd say inbetween WD SE and maxtor performance. Also tend to be best for raid options as their firmware seems to alway s provide best raid 0 speeds of any drives.

Other than that i'd not really recommend anything, samsung i don't really know much about, aren't talked about everywhere and still relatively new so we can't tell what reliability will be like(though there is no reason to question it).

So list would go

1/maxtor Dm9+
2/hitachi 250gxp
3/hitachi 180gxp
4/wdse
5/seagate 7200.7
6.seagate barrcuda 5

then sammy fits in there somewhere but i don't know where.

All of those up there(except the 180gxp and the sammy i don't know about) come in sata and IDe versions and you can choose whichever you like. With either mobo you choose you will be able to run 2 sata hdd's and up to 3 on ide assuming you use the 4th connector on ide for a cd drive.

[milgo]

Thanks for that drunkenmaster that has really given me food for thought. I'll do some investigating into the Maxtor Dm9+, reveiws etc, as they have been mentioned a couple of times, in this thread and others

Milgo

[milgo]

This is what i plan to do. I've ordered the Maxtor Dm9+ 120Gb and am going to ad this to my current setup.
Q. Which would you make master & which slave?. Why?.
Q. Should I aim to have the OS & programs on one drive and data on the other?.
Q. Should I partition the 120Gb disk?, if so what sizes should I be aiming for?.
Q. Has anyone come across an idiots guide as to how to accomplish this task?.

Thanks in advance.

[unrealrocks]

samsung spinpoint p80!

That'd be my choice! Very fast, Very quiet Getting one sometime soon!