what would be a good reliable 80Gb hard disk?
i shall be needing it to be on 24/7 ?
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what would be a good reliable 80Gb hard disk?
i shall be needing it to be on 24/7 ?
if you want reliable & quiet - Samsung
if you want reliable fast & semi quiet - Seagate
cheap - Maxtor (some poeple have had problems with them - I haven't personally and have used about 10 - some in my PC, others in PCs I have built for other people)
The enterprise people here will say WD, because their enterprise disks are second to none, but they do carry a price premium (when I last checked anyhow)
Hope this helps,
Dave
It is very hard to predict reliabitly, especialy on consumer hard drives that are made as cheaply as possible. New models come out every few months, and it is very difficult to predict how they will behave in the long term.
Consider the famous IBM deathstar (deskstar) issue of about 5 years ago. Up untill then IBM had been a relaiable make. But with that model they got something wrong in the design and the drives started dropping like flies. In the office where I worked, Two out of 8 drives failed in a RAID-5 array in the same weekend, and destroyed months worth of data.
Since then I have brought IBM on the grounds that having been burnt once, (and sued for it), they would be that bit more carefull than the competion. I have an IBM drive that has been running almost 24/7 in my linux box without a hitch for the past 4 years.
More recently I have switched to Segate, who I would reccomend, because they are the only make that offers a 5 year waranty on all conumer hard drives. It will not protect you against bad luck, but I think it makes a design fault a bit less likey, because segate know that it will cost them even if it takes a few years before the drives start breaking down.
Hi,
I agree with all said. Werstern Digital, and Seagate are probably the best reputation, but saying that I have been running a very cheap ExcelStor drive (hadn't heard of them before or since!) the last year and a half without any probs! To be safe, run drives in RAID, backing up data on multiple drives.
The Samsung 80GB SATA II HD I bought off Scan a few months (still current SATA model) was anything but quiet.
I've read on silentpcreview forums (user comments) that some Samsung models take a few hours to wear in and are quieter then - these were the SP2004C (200GB) and SP2504C (250GB) models though.
I'm currently in the market for a 80GB HD myself but can't decide between Seagate and Western Digital (I include Samsung when looking at 200GB plus). The latest WD drive may be quieter than than the Seagate.
I went to the Hitachi website and found a bit of software which, when burned to a bootable CD, allows you to modify the accoustic performance (amongst other things) of your hard disks, presumably by changing the performance of the HD though I haven't noticed any performance drop. It worked on both my Hitachi (quiet to start with) and my Maxtor (noisy to start with now nearly silent).
Sorry I haven't got a link, I'll see if I can find it out when I get home.
Some manufacturers do sell drives advertised specifically to be run 24/7, such as the Maxtor MaxLine range & the Seagate 24/7 Nearline Class. However you cannot buy such drives in such small capacities (80GiB) because such drives are usually intended for server usage where high storage density is important - 80GiB drives are near useless in today's server market where much larger drives are available & cheaper per GiB.
From my personal experience, I would strongly recommend a Seagate drive, as I have never had a Seagate drive fail on me, & trust me - I've had quite a few! For higher reliability I would recommend one of the U or 5400.1 series drives, which obviously spin slower than the 7200.7 series drives - the fewer revolutions, the less wear on the bearings, no?
You might as well assume that for the disk to considered "reliable" then it will need to be backed up somewhere else because there is no such thing as a guaranteed disk :)