Which hard drive?

[neonplanet40]

Hey guys im jsut curious. i have always stuck to the western digital caviers. they are brilliant and havent let me down yet. but this time i am getting a 300gb drive and am looking to get a sata one. Im not sure which one to get and most of them seem to be around £129. Is there one that would stand out?

Neo

[javalord]

www.Storagereview.com if your concerned about performance.

Also check out the reliability survey whilst your there. Hitachi 7K250 + have come a long way.

[mike_w]

I always go for Seagate drives - they are, in my experience, reliable and have a five year warranty.

[neonplanet40]

i notice the maxtor one has 16mb cache whereas the seagate only have 8. does this make a difference? they are both the same price so would i be safer getting the maxtor one?

Neo

[satan]

I don't like Maxtor, but it might perform better with double the cache of the Seagate.

[Akumu]

I have one of the 300gb Maxtors atm and all's good so far... I can't comment on speed because I only use it for storage, but it is very quiet... If you go for one, try and find a Maxline III rather than the Diamondmax 10, they're the same drive afaik but with the Maxline you get a 5 year warranty. The new Seagates look good too though.

[[DW]Cougho]

Having not really used any others (apart from a 2002 100gb IBM Deskstar, which was fast and reliable) i must say this new Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 i have is marvellous, its extrememly quick and almost noise free, i can hear my arctic cooler over it no problem.

[tom deloford]

16mb cache over 8mb will not be noticable for the majority of users. Caching only helps if you are repeatidly accessing the same data file (also applications get cached into main memory RAM so it wont make running programs any faster). As javalord said www.Storagereview.com is good site to learn this stuff and get advice. imo you should have 2 disks a "slow" data drive (300gb) and a fast smaller c drive for os.

[arthurleung]

Just a reminder the Maxtor 300G 16M have a pretty big power drain. But mine is a PATA one and the SATA one may be using less power.

The drive is fast and quiet, but it is HOT and power hungry. Alternative choices are Seagate 7200.8 or Western Digital WD3000JD/3200JD.

The 7200.8 seems to have some bug.
See link
My personal feeling is that the newest generation drives are not always the best drives.

[tfboy]

Well, of course, I can only speak of personal experience, but I will now avoid maxtor drives for life

I've had 3 fail in a system. They were DM9 drives.

Just before easter, bought the 300GB DM10 drive from scan. It's DOA

Not had any success with them really.

And I think I'll be changing the maxtors I do have in my system as soon as I can. Sadly, I just don't believe I can trust them any more

[Apex]

Samsung/Seagate

[Agent]

Check out this months PCPro, they have a great round-up of the most populat HD's.
Maxtors DM10 wins overall , with the seagate barracude 7200.8 coming in a close second.
They also make a point about it (the maxtor) getting warm, but claim its one of the quietest drives.

[eldren]

I have a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB 16MB SATA drive, and it is indeed quiet - its idle noise is roughly the same as that of my Samsung Spinpoints, as well as being in a different frequency range (In my opinion, a less annoying frequency range than the Sammies).

Its seek noise, however, is decidedly noticable, even from 2 meters away - AVG running a scheduled virus scan on it literally woke me up last weekend; granted I am a light sleeper (And yes, my bed is about two meters away from my PC ).

As for heat, according to SpeedFan's SMART reading, the Maxtor is currently at 32 celcius (Do note that I'm running my PC in a CoolerMaster CMStacker, which has a 120mm fan mounted on the front of each harddrive bay, each of which holds 4 harddrives).

[arthurleung]

My DM+10 runs at 34'C Idle, DM+9 at 36'C, Hitachi at 32'C and WD at 33'C. they all have about the same level of cooling. Could use as some sort of reference

[Fatboy]

I always go for Seagate drives - they are, in my experience, reliable and have a five year warranty.

5 years? That's useful, because I think the one on my desktop is ill, slow loading times, and then a hard disk read error in windows. Ran scandisk, but it came up clean, its got me worried now though.

[Fatboy]

"July 26, 2004 Seagate announced a 5 year warranty for products available through the channel purchased on or after June 1, 2004 (excluding external hard drives sold through retail outlets, including the pocket, portable and compact flash drives)."

Arse, guess I'll be buying one after all.