Any real difference between these 200gb drives?

[Stewart]

Which do you prefer? Any concreate reasons why I should choose one over the other?

Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB SATA 8MB Cache

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 200GB SATA 8MB Cache

Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 200GB 2000JD SATA 8MB Cache

Maxtor DiamondMax 10 200GB S-ATA 8MB cache 7200RPM

Which would you choose, whats the difference between the DiamondMax Plus 9 and 10, and why don't Samsung make a 200gb model of their superb SpinPoint series?

[Lee H]

I'd get the seagate - 5 yr warranty wins for me hands down

Seagate drives also are true SATA rather than employing a "bridging" solution much similar to the Nvidia VS Ati on the PCI-Express platform.

Seagates drives support Cyclic Redundancy Checking (CRC), and Native Command Queuing (NCQ) so they perform very well indeed, and when raided are quite fast.

Hope this helps

[Stewart]

Thats what I was looking for, yes.

[Aaron]

They're not anywhere near as quiet as the lovely old Barracuda IV/Vs though.

If you want out and out performance then the Hitachis are the absolute fastest according to Storage Review. Apparently their reliability isn't the best though, which could be even more worrying if you intend to RAID 0 them.

[Rave]

The diff between the Diamondmax 9 and 10 is that the 10 supports NCQ (maybe other things as well, but that's the main one). Since you can't yet get an AMD64 board with a chipset that supports NCQ the point is moot for now. The new via 8251 southbridge will apprently support it though, and I guess NForce 4 is pretty likely to as well.

I wasn't aware that the Seagates had NCQ too, good to know.

Rich :¬)

[mike_w]

I'd go for Seagate (well, I did!) because they've been reliable and for me, and now they have a 5 year warranty.

[skattrd]

I can't reccomend the WD Caviar - I've just had one of the 200Gig SE's die on me ... on the plus side 3yr warranty, but I'd go for the Seagates with 5yr warranty anytime.

[MAS]

Another vote for Seagate - used loads of them and never had a problem. I've had a WD die on me before as well. Plus a 5 year warranty; cant knock it really.

[ajbrun]

I got a 120 Gb version of that Maxtor diamond 9 one last week. I think it's quite good, but the only problem with it was that I thought it was a bit noisey. You can download a program to change this though through the maxtor site, but I think it decreases the performance slightley.

Link to my noisey HDD thread.

[BUFF]

It's all very well the drive supporting NCQ but iirc the chipset has to too & there are only about 2 that do.

[Rave]

ATM I'm pretty sure only the Intel ICH6 series southbridges support NCQ, but as I said the new Via 8251 and Nforce4 will too and should be arriving shortly.

Rich :¬)

[Lee H]

http://www.seagate.com/products/inte...atibility.html

There you go guys - a list of cards and motherboards that support NCQ...

oooh look ... good old Abit NF7-S 2.0 Motherboards supports NCQ via a bios update

[BenW]

Samsung spinpoints?