Reviews of less known hard drives

[Hans L]

I read a darn good review of 250 GB internal hard drives on

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/250_1.html

and was not impressed with the over-all result for any of the five disks (Hitachi DeskStar T7K250, Maxtor DiamondMax 10, Samsung SpinPoint, Seagate Barracuda 7200.9, and WD Caviar WD2500KS).

I am interested in 250 GB, and I wondered if there are any other models of the five brands above that perform better, but I also wondered if there are any reviews out there of other brands, some maybe not as famous, that have yielded better results.

Looking forward to comments.

[Clunk]

Are they all still current models? Its quite an old review.

[mike_w]

Certainly the new Seagates are quite different due to the perpendicular recording.

[Hans L]

You are right, guys, the review is from Feb 2006 (somehow, I thought it was July 2006). When you say "the new Seagates", which models are you referring to?

[Hans L]

I just read a brief article on perpendicular recording. Does it have anything to do with speed? It was the speed of the reviewed disks I was not so impressed with.

[mike_w]

The Seagate Barracudas 7200.10s use perpendicular recording, while is supposed to increase both capacity and speed.

[this_is_gav]

But also increases noise unfortunately.

Still not up to Raptor levels of course, and indeed quieter than most, but Seagate isn't a silent choice any more, unfortunately.

Not sure what you're after in terms of speed. Hard drives have never been faster - short of rigging up a RAID0 array (or a higher level including redundancy) and using multiple Raptors or something, I'm not sure what you can do.

[Hans L]

Good to hear that the speed has improved too. No, as far as noise goes, what about installing a hard drive silencer, for instance

http://www.logisyscomputer.com/views...102BL&DID=Main

?

[Hans L]

Just read about the Seagate hard drive model number system.

ST3250620AS & ST3250820AS, for instance, are supposedly two different models where the only difference is that in one, the formatting capacity is 250620 MB, and in the other, it is 250820 MB. Why did they not average ithem out, calling them 250720?

No, on another of Seagate's pages, it said that "6" and "8" meant the number of drives. and "20" was the generation. Sounds much more plausible, doesn't it?

[Hans L]

As you work with these things, you get new insights. Not that I am probably telling you anything you did not already know, but I think that 6 and 8 in 620 and 820 means 16 and 8 MB cache, respectively.

I'll probably go with Seagate Barracuda 7200 SATA 250 MB.

[MadduckUK]

apparently the Maxtor has 100 GB/platter... so thats two and a half of them then?