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Well everyone seem's to love their own makes... My seagates are showing wear and tear, my maxtor is developing physical errors, and my IBM keeps doing a high pitched beep stall. So I guess its time to get a new one.
Computer is on 24/7 and the HD will be heavily used, so this is a important factor to put in.
Basically I want speed and reliability.
Any recommendations?
I recomend getting 2 Western Digitals or Samsungs and putting them in a RAID 1 array (if you can). This way you have a much smaller chance of losing your data if one fails.
Hmm ive had people recommend WD's before, but never samsungs. As for data loss. It will mainly be for video processing and storage before dvd backup, so that isnt really a issue. Perhaps a few games too, but again, no big loss if it pops it's clogs.
Samsungs are surprisingly good disks. They are probably the quietest out there too. I have several 20GB drives that have been going for years.
Must say.. ive never really seen them either. I was looking more towards the 250+ maybe even 350+ GB range.
I have always used Maxtors and, touch wood, I've never had a problem. In fact, I've just sold an old 40Gb one to a mate that's at least 5years old and still going strong :)
The old maxtors were troopers, ive still got a bigfoot hanging around. Their newer bunch leave a lot to be desired. I have been looking at the maxlines.. but im not sure if i want to take the risk and end up RMA'ing within a month. Ive had a lot of DOA maxtor's and ones that have died quickly. Faith in them is shot.
Cue another Samsung fanboy.
My main emphasis is on silence, but the P120 models are also fairly good performers.
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=247245
I'm running 3 of the above in RAID 5 at the moment, I've bought 10 or so in the past, and had problems with none of them.
I think the Hitachi's are also pretty good, but don't quote me on that, as I don't have first hand experience with them.
I'm slightly concerned at the alarming numbers of HDs you have that are failing though...
Depends how long you've had them, how many drives you have total of course, but that does seem like a fair few disks to get through?
Are you giving them enough ventilation?
Im considering one of the new .10 seagates 320Gb on just two platters, they have had some good reviews.
The IBM is oldest, followed by the seagates, then the maxtors, the maxtors are youngest, but failing most, which is why my faith in them is shot. Ventilation was a issue in my old case, but there wasnt all that much i can do about it. Now they are sat with a 120 blowing straight across them, nice and cool. When it comes down to it, ive had a good run with the age of them (except the maxtors).Quote:
Originally Posted by FatalSaviour
Seagates, Western Digital and samsung seem to be the final choices, anyone wish to sway me with features. Silence isnt high on the list however :PQuote:
Originally Posted by teachmech
lots of maxtors and certain hitachis are the ones that are "known" as dodgy
certain seagates (.9 series???) tend to be loud
hitachis are often best for accsess times (good OS drives), wd drives used to be best for transfer rates (good for large file storage/processing) but now theyve been overtaken and the samsung p120 drives are faster and also the quietest around
in the end it all depends what your preferences are but just avoid the dodgy maxtor and hitachi models and it shouldnt matter too much
Samsung P120 are the best drives I have ever bought. My system is on 24/7 and currently houses 2x 250Gb Samsung's RAID and a single 160Gb Samsung boot drive (all SATA). System is whisper quiet and ultra reliable, the 160Gb drive is going on 4 early next year is still in perfect health.
My 160GB Seagate ATA has treated me fine the past few months I've had it ^^ Is noiseless to. Will probably be buying a 250gb seagate in the upcoming weeks. :)
Don't forget, Seagates have a five year warranty.
I ordered 4 of those to upgrade my RAID after reading reports on them and checking the reliability of the previous generation (.9)Quote:
Originally Posted by teachmech
They are such new drives that its anyones guess how reliable they will be in the long-run though.
Have been Maxtor for years but as others report, the newer ones seem to be a bit hit-and-miss.
Another Samsung fanboy here... currently using an 80gb SpinPoint as my OS drive and it's been superb. One of my 250gb SATAII Seagate drives (DV storage and processing) has popped it's clogs, thinking of replacing with a Samsung now :)
If you want speed and reliability then Raptors are the only way to go.. Samsungs are nice and quiet, fairly reliable.. but they don't touch Raptors in performance.Quote:
Originally Posted by BeoWulf
The problem is filtering the facts from the BS that floats on most forums (including these) :(Quote:
Originally Posted by shaithis
I’ve seen it many times where people have claimed they have had devices die on them, to only go back on it or change it to “it was a mates” (which a large amount of the time, it means they have been talking rubbish) when quizzed further.
Unfortunately people feel they have to justify their purchase to the ends of the earth, even when it’s a bad one – this includes slating other manufactures, usually reiterating what others have said to “fit in”, even when they have no experience of them first hand.
Remember that not everything you read on a forum is going to be true.
I looked into this about a year back for the exact same reason. It turned out that Maxtor drives had a MTBF (mean time between failure) that is in line with the industry standard, with one particular model (note: not series) suffering from problems. When these were RMA’ed, Maxtor were sending out drives double the size of the one RMA’ed as a way of pleasing customers. This was when HD prices were no where near as cheap as they are now.
Problem is, people read that one drive had an issue - then through multiple people reiterating the information, it gets changed to “the series had an issue”. Soon after its “Maxtor drives are unreliable” and I am shortly expecting Maxtor drives to be blamed for the problems of the space shuttle Discovery.
Having spoke to several retailers about this, I can confidently say most of the “Maxtor drives have issues” is non-sense. RMA’s of Maxtor drives are around the same as other manufactures. Their Maxline series are superb and are used in many high-profile servers.
I urge you to go and research it for yourself like I have. Speak to retailers - most are happy to talk about it.
If Maxtor drives were that bad, retailers wouldn’t stock them. Not a huge amount is made off Hard drives anyway – why would they waste time in selling them only to have any profit they have made wiped out by having to RMA a drive?
That’s my rant for today :)
Well, I am talking from experience...ordered 6 of the 200GB DiamondMax 10 a while ago.....4 for me, 2 for freinds (including a flatmate).
1 of mine has died and so has my flatmates. 33% is probably not indicative of the failure rate, although I am not happy buying more Maxtor drives, especially when I see others complaiing about failures.
Both have gone in the same manor as well: they either dont spin-up from cold or spin down while you are using them, sometimes they come back, sometimes not.
There is no smoke without fires.
which model was it agent?
Some of the early series 9 - 80gig SATA 7200RPM drives.Quote:
Originally Posted by -ChEM-
They did a second revision of them that fixed any issues (i have one in my machine now :))
The Seagates are perhaps the best for the semi-high-performance user - thats the wd raptors.
so if you are not going the route of the raptors, then i would suggest a pair of seagates - im in your position myself also, as after i have paid my car insurance i am going to upgrade my 2x160gb 7200.7's to 2x320gb 7200.10s ;
i had issues with one of my seagate drives about a year ago, and i emailed seagate - it took them about 2 weeks to get me new refurb replacements. they have been great from day one.
i just hate the fact that the sata connectors are so amazingly poorly designed that it doesnt take much to break them, even more likely should you have a cramped-ish case.
for me i am going to go seagate again - cant afford raptors, and these drives give good performance and arent hideously expensive - i think ill ask scan to put them on today only once im ready!
I'd say its all pretty much about luck really.
I've had a few hard drives die on me in the past: 1 maxtor, 2 Western Digitals and 2 IBM's.
The maxtor was an old one and pretty much just failed, so couldn't recover the data.
I actually had a 2500JD Western Digital fail on my not long ago. But thing I've found the western digitals is that I've always managed to recover the data. Took a lot of messing around and crapping my self that I'd lost 250GB's of data!
The 2 IBM's were the older deathstar models that were known to have a 'few' issues.
Sadly the raptors cripple you in the wallet department heh.Quote:
Originally Posted by aidanjt
Well damn.. thats one comprehensive reply heh. Thanks for the info, but when you get bitten a few times, its not human nature to go back (referring to the non-bs'ers). The ones i tended to have fail, were 80 gig'ers, if I get the tendency to take apart my computer I will get a model number for you, I think its serial number started with 68yop, something like that, although im not too certain.Quote:
Originally Posted by Agent
Sadly, hard drives are pretty open to failure something moving extremely fast on a bed of air, scary stuff. But im of a similar accord when it comes to failures.Quote:
Originally Posted by shaithis
2 weeks for a turnaround, I would say thats a little slow in this day and age :P Sata connectors do suck in that respect, luckily my case is fairly open. Sadly im in the same boat with the raptor situation, good drives, just insanely expensive.Quote:
Originally Posted by 5aboy
I might have a look into these Samsung drives, they seem pretty good value as far as price/reputation is going.
I've got a 40GB IBM Deathstar to replace that's been running nearly 9 years now :O_o1: and could probably do with being put into retirement before it decides to die on me.
Deskstar/deathstar do have a reputation I must admit. I like the WD recovery rate youve had, although the data probably wont be all that important im storing on it.Quote:
Originally Posted by ash_rm
What about more of the feature wise, such as how it deals with failure recovery etc, access rates and the like. And propriety technology that might give a drive a edge.
I did look at the samsungs, but they have a apparent total lack of 16meg cache in their range. I was hoping for one with that little tidbit.
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Codfather
Well done! heh. Still can't beat my 2 gig bigfoot, it takes up a full 5 12 drive slot, i think it only has 2 physical errors on it heh.
Both myself and my friend have been happy IBM/Hitachi Deskstar customers for years now...never had a problem at all.
Having said that, it doesn't translate to their laptop hard drives. Had more of those fail on us here at work than any other make of laptop drives. We had a whole bunch of them which *literally* lasted to about a month beyond their 3yr warranty, and then just collapsed, lol.
As far as desktop HDDs go, the most reliable ones we use at work seem to be Seagates. Plus, they have that 5 yr warranty now, so they must pretty pretty confident of their own reliability.....or are they just playing mind games? Argh!
Just to update, IBM/Hitachi have definitely come a long way since the old deathstars and have very reliable and fast drives now with great access times.Quote:
Originally Posted by BeoWulf
I almost wish I bought Deskstar T7K250 250GB for my primary machine instead of my Samsung Spinpoint. From the sounds of it they're not much louder but a hell of a lot quicker performance wise.
I used to always buy Western Digital pretty much since I had two WD800JD's that never let me down since I bought them, around 3-4 yrs ago and were very fast at the time. Not so sure since my 2500JD failure, although they were very quick with the turnaround of the replacement drive and they give you two weeks to ship the faulty one back after you receive the replacement, so I was able to do a straight transfer from the faulty one to the working one. I suppose there could of just been a problem with that model?
One of my mates just got a WD2500KS and that is very quick and gives excellent XBench scores.
I've got two of them, well had 2, one of them was obviously dodgey stock and has died after a couple of weeks of very light use, I can safely say that they are pretty speedy though (but I would do a backup just in case).Quote:
Originally Posted by teachmech
The bad deskstar rumors are from when IBM made them, heard nothing bad about the new Hitachi ones.
Samsungs I've heard a re good, pretty good performers (won't win awards for it though) but very quiet.
WDs, Maxtors, all good. I can say that nothing beats a raptor ATM, I have a 150GB one as my system drive and 1 320GB 7200.10 (was 2 untill the aforementioned incedent) as my data drive.
If the machine is 24/7, I would even rule out the use of SATA, instead SCSI drives are the ones designed to withstand extreme temperature changes, capable to handle multiple tasks at any given time, however they are expensive and designed for servers.
Had a couple of Maxtors fail recently, I won't be going with them again in the near future, going to get a spinpoint for my new pc