Large 250 Gb v small 120 Gb - advice please

[pussycat]

Hi

I was originally drawn to the

250Gb Maxtor Maxline III 24x7 Reliability (7200rpm,16MB) SATA II NCQ - Lead Free

I liked the 16 Mb cache and have always had smaller hard drives from Maxtor and they have worked well.
However a friend said he considered the larger drives i.e. 200Gb+
to be more unreliable than the smaller ones.
He recommended getting 120Gb drives.

Please could you tell me if he is correct?

Are the larger drives less reliable?

Thanks

[arthurleung]

They wont be any less reliable.

Partly-correct. The drive itself won't be any lass reliable, but it put a bit more strain on the PSU. Since larger harddrives usually drains more power from the PSU. (Especially DM10/ML3like). You get more voltage fluctuation when the harddrive is used with cheap PSU. And of course you can fry your harddrive with this kind of voltage fluctuation.

I did that not once, not twice, but 5 times.

[icq3800846]

I've done it twice.... fried two hard drives with a PSU rated at 600 Watt that cost me.. errrrr... £29.99 brand new. Incidentally, they were both 120 gig drives, one Maxtor, one WD. Also had so much trouble with drives just cycling out all on their own.

IMHO I'd get a SATA II with the biggest cache and largest disk space you can afford to make it as future proof as possible, but highly recommend a decent PSU.

After all, your whole system relies on it.

[pussycat]

Thanks very much for your replies.
They were very helpful.

My friend has also fried a number of large hard drives
but put it down to them being less reliable than smaller drives rather than problems with a cheap power supply.

So he jumped to the wrong conclusion,
as he quite often does.
Being a pesimist he is often pronoucing my old trusty pc dead
but I have always managed to fix it. so far !

What power supplies would you reccomend?

Cheers.

[arthurleung]

Thanks very much for your replies.
They were very helpful.

My friend has also fried a number of large hard drives
but put it down to them being less reliable than smaller drives rather than problems with a cheap power supply.

So he jumped to the wrong conclusion,
as he quite often does.
Being a pesimist he is often pronoucing my old trusty pc dead
but I have always managed to fix it. so far !

What power supplies would you reccomend?

Cheers.

Antec, Hiper, Tagen, Seasonic are good. They cost quite a lot though.
My Antec TP1 550W had served me well with 8 hdds attached to it.
Akasa is pretty good as well and have a lower price tag.

[mike_w]

My Tagan hasn't blown up yet

[sawyen]

Both my Tagan on my 2 64 rigs are as stable as a proverbial rock.. even at redline HTT overclock.. god bless german engineering..

[aidanjt]

I have two raptors attached to my Tagen, works flawlessly.. as for reliablity, capacity doesn't change anything, they all use about the same power.

[Thorsson]

Both my Tagan on my 2 64 rigs are as stable as a proverbial rock.. even at redline HTT overclock.. god bless german engineering..

Tagan's are made in China, like 90+% of PSUs.

They're a decent PSU at a goodish price, but they've been over-hyped. People have had problems with them, including the famous blow-outs at Tom's Hardware. I think the quality control is a bit lacking and occasionally a dodgy batch gets shipped.

For rock-solid PSUs, no frills, at a fair price, Seasonic take some beating at present. At least that you can buy in this country. Akasa is looking to move into the top-end, but you'd have to be careful which model you bought. One for the future, rather than right now. Antec have had problems with underpowered 12V rails, probably only an issue with top-end (NF4) rigs, and again it doesn't seem to be every unit, but I'd give them a miss. Def give Hiper a miss: http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20...sstest-28.html

[pussycat]

Hi

Thanks for your reply
it was extremely helpful.

I like the sound of the

600w Seasonic S12-600 Matt Black SLi Ready Silent PSU 2xPCI-E 4xSATA 120mm Fan ATX1.3/2.01

from Scan.

"CustomPC Best PSU of 2005 "

But it is slightly pricey.

I have the idea that I will start with a single graphics card
then upgrade to a sli rig in the future.
But I am not completely set on this idea.

Cheers

[Scarlet Infidel]

A larger drive might have more platters, i dont know if this increases chance of failure, i wouldnt worry about it.

[Thorsson]

Yeah, both larger platters and a faster spin speed will increase the chance of failure, but we are talking very small numbers in most cases. If the MTBF is 300,000 hours or 500,000, who's going to notice the difference?

With this level of reliability one needs only to worry about manufacturers being light on the truth and/or poor on the warranty.

[zaphod]

The main obvious problem with large disks failing is when the fail you lose more data than a smaller disk. get you self 4x 160's and run them on raid 5!! If one disk goes, get a new one and rebuild the missing data

[arthurleung]

The main obvious problem with large disks failing is when the fail you lose more data than a smaller disk. get you self 4x 160's and run them on raid 5!! If one disk goes, get a new one and rebuild the missing data

Why not 4x300 RAID5 then

[Hans Voralberg]

That's a hell lot of money And 4x160 is pretty adequate unless you're a pr0n freak