PC hardware: Who makes the best hard drives?
Bare = OEM
by BgMarSwat1 - 4/29/05 4:25 AM In reply to: (NT) What do you mean by "BEAR"? by Conky0I am just guessing, but I believe that wahnula meant OEM when he was talking about BARE drives. These drives are intended for new systems and come without any cables or a manual. They also often are not in a box, but rather bubble wrapped.
They typically are a few dollars cheaper, and the cables are usually not needed. Most manufacturers have an online manual as well, and installation is really easy, especially on an XP machine.
Besides unpluging the machine and opening the case, the only thing that needs to be done is to check the jumpers on the back and plug it in. XP will auto-detect it and walk you through the rest of the process.
If you are considering buying, look at WWW.NEWEGG.COM, they seem to always have the best deals, shipping is cheap, and service is very quick. Never had a problem with them, and they are the only company I buy from any more.
Maxline?
by CoyotePuma - 4/29/05 11:33 PM In reply to: Bare = OEM by BgMarSwat1I'm giving the Maxtor Maxline III 7B300S0 300GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer at ZipZoomFly a look at because I run a four computer home network with 200 books (text), 20k music, 1000 pictures, and 400 movies on board. I've have the idea of consolidate the ATA into one system of four SATAs totalling one TBs or more. Four ov these drives will do that nicely and with 16MB buffers and Gb LAN it should be fairly seamless. Anybody out there have any warnings that might be useful? -- CP
CoyotePuma@Hotmail.com
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=100719-1
Best Hard drives
by builderbob - 4/29/05 4:40 AM In reply to: My take is... by wahnulaAs a "system builder" I have had good success with all Maxtor drives.
Some of my customers insist on Wester Digital.
One of the quietest drives I have personally used is a Seagate 20gig 5400rpm (about 5 years old)
While in Florida a few weeks ago, one of my friends
needed a new drive, so I sent him out on a shopping trip. The three drives listed on his shopping list were, Maxtor, Seagate and WD, Hitachi.
He found a 160 Seagate Drive/7200rpm at BestBuy with a rebate, finaly price was $49.and some change.
Today's harddrive prices are decent. You can usally find a good buy somewhere. Anything under a $1.00/per gig is a good buy.
Hitachi bought IBM's harddrive division. The quality remains the same, and the price on their Serial ATA drives are decent.
The final decision rests with the end -user, personally I like Seagates move to the 5year warranty.
good luck,
builderbob
I was a.....
by cesareDH - 4/29/05 5:31 AM In reply to: My take is... by wahnulaMaxtor enthusiast for years, but I switched to Western Digital about 4 years ago, and seem to get better over-all performance and longevity.
SCSI Cheetah
by msgale - 4/29/05 2:34 PM In reply to: My take is... by wahnulaI have have/had two SCSI Cheetah 15K drive one died and the other was the replacement I also have a FUJITSU 15K drive. I have had no problems setting up any of them. I also have a Seagate 10K with has been no problem. The Seagate 10K drive is U320, the others are U160. P.S I also have two eight year old Wester Digital 7K scsi drive (wide) which are still going in circles. The only specific drive that I can ever remember being a problem was a Quantum 105 MBYTES, from the early 1990s. I think every one we had at work died within three years.
Quantum Dirve
by Bebelos - 5/27/05 1:22 PM In reply to: SCSI Cheetah by msgaleThis is a demonstration of how personal experience affects buying decisions.
I have a Quantum 162 Mb from the 90's that will still spin up. I use it to treat my 6yr old nephew to those old DOS/Win 3.1 games we all loved to play.
The only drives I have ever lost to malfunction were Maxtor's. Maxtor customer service was almost as bad as AOL's.
My last purchase was the WD's, ATA133, 7200rpm, 80GB and 120GB, and they are still working fine. I also run a Seagate 4GB with Win 98 on it for compatibility with games of that era.
With Seagate's new 5 year warranty, a Seagate will be my next purchase.
Seagate all the way
by pyrixpx - 4/29/05 4:43 AM In reply to: Who makes the best hard drives? by culture_of_oneEver so reliable.
Great warranties for when are not so reliable.
Western Digital go well too, and are probably just as good as Seagate, but given choice, I woulkd go Seagate.
Steer very, very, very clear of Maxtor - dodge, Quantam whom u may remeber as the tops from W95 days, have been absorbed by Maxtor, so dont trust that brand name either.
General advice - 7200rpm is great for normal and even fairly intensive use - if possible go for SATA, but IDE works fine, depends what motherboard ur using.
Make sure OS is put on faster hard drive, speeds whole system up.
General rule of thumb, dont go larger than 120gb, as a) is usually plenty big enough, and b) all manufacturers do to get pretty numbers like 200gb and 400gb is to pack the 'cells' closer together, resulting in higher fail rates, and hard drive crashes and shorter life.
dont pay more than the rough equivalent of $1AUD per gigabyte - not sure what country your from, so do you own conversions.
$1AUD=
by cesareDH - 4/29/05 5:43 AM In reply to: Seagate all the way by pyrixpx$1.27USD, and I'd like to buy anything that is only $1.27 per gigabyte. Probably get at least 10 if not 100 of them.
huh?
by GMartin2R - 5/1/05 11:35 PM In reply to: $1AUD= by cesareDHwhy would you do that? that would make a 160 gb hd over $200. there's no way i'm paying that much for a 160 gb hd. i was 135 for my seagate 160. and that's sata too. pata would probably drop the price down another $20 or so.
and about the dont go over 120 gb thing. i read somewhere on here that someone was consistenyl having problems with the 120gb sata seagate drives. made me glad i'd gone with the 160 as it was the model above it.
Seagate indeed.
by thefoxbox - 4/29/05 5:45 AM In reply to: Seagate all the way by pyrixpxI'll tell you, my Seagate HD started to crash and I lost about 20% of my music, and every now and then I found files that are corrupt, but I received a new hard drive for $24.95 (they sent the HD, and allowed me to keep the other one for up to 30 days so I could transfer my materials, and gave me a shipment container so I could ship my old one back). Very convenient!
Hard drives will fail--they rotate and write a lot, but support of the customers is important as well.
P.S. Don't continue to leave your computer on until you have connected another hard drive to transfer data to. I could have kept a lot more of my music and files.
Seagate is best Hard drive
by jimboh - 4/29/05 4:50 AM In reply to: Who makes the best hard drives? by culture_of_oneI have over a dozen, all ata interface, all 7200 rpm, different sizes. I find them all to be pretty much comperable, if the disk is larger the 80 gig and other specs are reasonably close. However, I like seagate the best, due to their 5 year warranty. While statistically they should be the same, I take this as a statement of confidence from the manufacturer their HDDwill last. Afterall
Be aware some SATA drives have simply grafted the SATA onto existing IDE interface (at factory), so won't perform as well. Most shouldbeo sold thru the channel, but possible some still may be around.
Pentax Optio S5i HELP!!!
by marymcintaggart - 9/30/05 3:40 AM In reply to: Seagate is best Hard drive by jimbohHi I've got the camera - taken the photos - deleted them by accident - taken some more then tried to download to computer. I have the correct cables but not the software for the computer. Can I download this free anywhere. Help. mcintaggart@yahoo.com
Lots of issues
by Gsteele - 4/29/05 5:29 AM In reply to: Who makes the best hard drives? by culture_of_oneSpeed: 7200 RPM drives are the standard, now. 5400 is out of date. Buffer sizes range from 2 to 8 MB in the mainstream drives you'll find commonly on sale at Staples, OfficeMax, CompUSA, Best Buy, Circuit City. I only buy 8 MB buffer drives. On performance, for any given drive, check the web - Anantech, Tom's Hardware, etc.
WD's are good at streaming, Seagates are quiet and reliable, Maxtors are quick at seeking. They absorbed Quantum, to be sure, but Quantum had the inside track on management of segmented buffers on the drive controller board. I had several 245 MB Quantums and they beat the pants off anything else in the market. I constantly would save files a second time because the computer would come back so fast, I'd worry that I hadn't saved the first time. And this was in the days of 33MHz 486's.
A good indicator of quality is the size of the company, since that indicates a dominant OEM supplier. OEM's don't want warranty repair headaches, so they buy what works most reliably, and their certification programs are far more extensive than a home user's. Seagate kind of rules here.
As for size, bigger is better, for obvious geometric reasons. If the along-track bit density is higher, the transfer rate increases, and if the track pitch is tighter, then (with the exception of track-track seeks) in general, seek times will be shorter for a given span of data, since the heads have a lesser distance to move. Note that average seek times are typically 1/3 stroke - the actual seek time depends on how far the head has to move, acceleration and deceleration time, and track settling time while it synchs up with the bitstream. So fewer seeks, shorter distances, and the cylinder organization for multiple platters, which puts more data under a given set of heads before they have to move, trades off against the inertia inherent in the greater mass of the larger number of heads to move.
Cache management pays off here if track buffering is used, because rotational latency time doesn't interfere with requests for subsequent clusters. A good elevator seek algorithm pays off in reducing randomness of request overhead, but this really pays off much more in the server market; desktop data retrieval is much more deterministic, and seldom challenging. Likewise command queueing, which is showing up in the SATA drives.
So while these are clever technologies, they aren't worth paying for in a desktop. Likewise SATA; the only advantages are hot plug and smaller cables which don't obstuct air flow. Read the specs: serial transfer rates are megabits (Mb) and parallel are megabytes (MB); one is 8 times the other -- don't be fooled by the hype. Hot plug is nice, though.
On price, the weekend flyers, especially aroung President's Day, if history is any predictor, rule. The current sweet spot is in the 80-160 GB range, with prices between .33 and .50 per Gigabyte. Prices go up at capacities below or above that, but that changes all the time; all prices converge to a minimum, manufacturing-cost derived price over time. The best deals I've seen were about .25 per GB (a 120 GB for $30), but I shop only occasionally, although I do read the flyers regularly.
Hope this helps.
About speed.......
by alidickson - 4/29/05 6:30 AM In reply to: Lots of issues by GsteeleI've been tracking this discussion, and I see a lot of people talking about speed. I only have a 30GB HD on WinXP w/SP2. I've used 18GB. My problem is SPEED though. And THAT stems from the fact that I live in the boonies, and there is no such thing as DSL or cable. So I am stuck with dial up modem running at 21.6 on a regular basis (56k modem). So when you guys are discussing speed in relation to HD's, does a larger HD MEAN faster speed? Because I've been told it wouldn't help me run any faster. I would gladly buy a 2nd slave HD if it would help me run faster!!
Thanks for any advice!
Ali
meaning internet speed?
by GMartin2R - 5/1/05 11:44 PM In reply to: About speed....... by alidicksonif so then the HD should have little to no effect on that. assuming you're talking about the differnt RPM rates that the drives actually spin at. now if you're trying to speed up your computers performance in general the HD is one thing to consider but definitely not the first. aside from maybe use as virtual memory the size of the HD doesnt dictate how fast a computer runs unless it's the main slow point. meaning the CPU, ram, and chipset have to be trying to find date on it faster than the drive can look for it. size by itself doesnt equate to speed. the RPM at which the drive spins dictates speed, given theres' enough computer to run that. a 10,000 RPM drive is going to work faster than a 5400 RPM drive, which will be somewaht slower than a 7200 RPM drive. 7200 is kinda industry standard with 10k and possibly 15k(scsi rate?) being the newer technologies. that answer your question?
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