Hard Drive preference?

[pre]

Ive had 2 WDs caviars 8mb for last 3-4 years and theyve more or less been run 24/7 in that time. Still going strong - have really stopped me "upgrading" to SATA since release. Only problem is they have always been quite noisy compared to newer solutions from other companies...

[dodgybob]

I have a mate who works for returns in a computer store and by far the biggest number of returns are for maxtors. Hardly ever any seagates. Not sure about the other brands.

[Marcos]

I have a mate who works for returns in a computer store and by far the biggest number of returns are for maxtors. Hardly ever any seagates. Not sure about the other brands.

How does that compare against the number that get sold though?

I dont personally trust Maxtor, but i think they are amongst the cheapest so probably the bestselling

[dodgybob]

It's one of the bigger web stores, don't want to get him in trouble by naming the store. They must sell quite a lot though.

[Ben Rogers]

Voted for maxtor as ive had an 8.4gb maxtor 5400rpm since 1999 and it still works 24/7, but had a 60gb seagate barracuda iv for 3 years, never gave me any problems..20gb wd for 2 years, shows low fitness reading on speedfan but works fine, 120gb maxtor for 1.5 years, also fine and a 40gb fujitsu since 2001 all 24/7...only hdd that gave up was a 40gb excelstore that I think used the same electronics as the infamous IBM Deathstars so not really suprised it lasted 2 months before making a clicking sound all the time and not getting recognised by bios. The 120gb is a bit loud but thats mainly due to it sitting on the desk. 4 1 gig seagate 3600?rpm drives from '95 that still work along with 3 quantum (maxtor) fireball 1.2gb drives from the same era.

[Dooms]

Seagate generaly but running WD atm due to raptorness

[directhex]

i'll stick with samsung until i have one die on me.

[rajagra]

Seagate generaly but running WD atm due to raptorness

I've just used Ghost to copy between 2 raptors.
I got 2800MB/minute continuously!!!
(Admittedly it was only 5GB of data.)
That's more than twice as fast as I've ever seen before.
Partly it's down to the new PC, but copying from an IBM Deskstar to a raptor on the same PC still only manages 1800MB/min. I'm well impressed (by the raptors, not the IBM!).

I'll have to stick a 15K SCSI drive in to see how it compares.

[BenW]

Had 1 WD and 1 samsung. The Samsung is so much faster and quieter!

Samsung for me

[Butcher]

I've just used Ghost to copy between 2 raptors.
I got 2800MB/minute continuously!!!
(Admittedly it was only 5GB of data.)
That's more than twice as fast as I've ever seen before.
Partly it's down to the new PC, but copying from an IBM Deskstar to a raptor on the same PC still only manages 1800MB/min. I'm well impressed (by the raptors, not the IBM!).

I'll have to stick a 15K SCSI drive in to see how it compares.

Sequential read/write speeds aren't hugely different between any drives. The real gain on the faster spinning disks is improved seek times.

[HKPolice]

Hitachi. I have 2 of them for about a year now, and they're solid as rock plus their access times are BELOW advertised (8.5ms). I have 2x 300GB Maxtor DM10 with 16MB cache and SATA NCQ too, but one of them was LOUD, so I had to RMA it. The access times on the maxtors are really crappy (16ms on first run of the test) but if you keep testing it, the access times get lower. I think maxtor is 'cheating' somehow with the huge 16MB buffer... My hitachies get consistant 11ms random seeks no matter how many times I run the test. (HDTach).