Harddrive Quality

[xequence]

What hard drive manufacturer has the best quality, in your opinion?

[BSDFreak]

What hard drive manufacturer has the best quality, in your opinion?

Seagate

[23meg]

Be prepared to read the most positive and the most negative possible comments about the same brand from different people.

I've had the best experiences with Maxtor and Western Digital, and the worst with Seagate and IBM's Deskstar drives (some of which I think were recalled later due to a proven defect).

[noco37]

I have never had a problem with a Western Digital and Maxtor is a close second. I was raised to hate Seagate ( bad influances on BBBSs ).

I will never buy a no name drive again. They have been worse the POS, next to a Conner, of course.

[BSDFreak]

Seagate

I should perhaps clarify this, i have had little experience with SCSI drives other than Seagate and very little experience with other drives than WD's and Seagates running IDE configs but for me, Seagate has proven themselves whild the WD/IBM drives (same manufacturer) have given me headaches, i have heard good things about Maxtor IDE drives and they are usually cheaper too.

[prizrak]

I had no problems with any drives actually :) The only time an HDD died on me (or even got bad clusters) in like 18 years was a laptop drive. Don't remember if it was Toshiba or Hitachi. Desktop drives never died, I use Western Digitals right now though and I hear that Maxtors are the worst.

[fordfan753]

I love my WD drive, never had a problem with it, and it was fairly cheap too.

[BSDFreak]

I had no problems with any drives actually :) The only time an HDD died on me (or even got bad clusters) in like 18 years was a laptop drive. Don't remember if it was Toshiba or Hitachi. Desktop drives never died, I use Western Digitals right now though and I hear that Maxtors are the worst.

I believe that Maxtors got that rep because of their cheaper price.

Hitatchi makes great SCSI drives (server wise), i don't even know if they make IDE's anymore.

[BSDFreak]

Be prepared to read the most positive and the most negative possible comments about the same brand from different people.

I've had the best experiences with Maxtor and Western Digital, and the worst with Seagate and IBM's Deskstar drives (some of which I think were recalled later due to a proven defect).

Since you have PROVEN your dishonesty by deleting a post of mine and editing your own i hope everyone realizes how dishonest you are and that your word doesn't mean shiat.

[futz]

Tho I've heard lots of badmouthing of Maxtor, I've used many over the years and never had one fail. I've got well over a thousand gigabytes worth of Maxtor drives here in multiple machines. Six of them are in three large RAID-0 arrays that have been up for several years. Those arrays make me a bit nervous, so I do good backups of important stuff, but no problems so far (knock wood).

Years ago I had a couple Western Digital drives fail on me inside warranty, so I kinda stopped buying em for a while. But I've now got four Raptors in my two Linux boxes and am very happy with them. The plastic alignment thingies on the SATA connectors break off way too easily (previous owner broke 2 of the 4), but I soldered the cables directly to the connectors and they work fine again.

If you have a broken SATA connector and want a cable soldered on directly to save the drive from the scrap heap, contact me here. For a small fee I'll repair em for ya. I have good equipment (static free, temp-controlled iron (WES50) and anti-static wrist strap) and good soldering skills.



Hitatchi makes great SCSI drives (server wise), i don't even know if they make IDE's anymore.
Yes, they do. http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/menuitem.88209297e0b10f8056fb11f0aac4f0a0/

[mstlyevil]

I have used both maxtor(IDE) and WD(SATA). I have had good luck with both drives myself. As far as Maxtor being cheaper than WD, I just bought a WD SATA II drive for about 20 dollars less than a comparable drive from Maxtor. Both the PC Club (local store) and Newegg were listing WD cheaper than Maxtor for a 250 GB SATA II 8MB drive. I don't think Maxtor is the cheaper drive anymore.

[xequence]

Since you have PROVEN your dishonesty by deleting a post of mine and editing your own i hope everyone realizes how dishonest you are and that your word doesn't mean shiat.

Wow, slow down here... Atleast if you are going to say really bad things about someone on my topic, give us some specific examples of what said person did =P

[mstlyevil]

BTW I forgot to mention that WD SATA II drives meet or beat the raptors in most speed test so the better drives to have now would probally be a SATA II drive. WD also gets great reviews among different hardware testing sites like anandtech.

[xequence]

All the IDE, ATA, SATA, SATA II stuff sorta confuses me. Which is the best of those? Are they just ways to connect the hard drive to the rest of the computer? Which is most popular now? Which is cheaper?

[ПОПТОНЖ]

Every drive I have owned except one (an ancient 2gb maxtor bigfoot) has failed. My IBM 20gb deskstar began failing but didn't completely fail before I put it in another machine for a friend who didn't use it all the time and it's been hanging on for years.

4 Maxtors and a Seagate, all purchased since 2001, have failed. Two of the Maxtors I obtained from a friend who had already had them replaced under warranty. He had one of those ridiculous dorm file servers in which he had installed 8 maxtors, seagates and WDs (he purchased whatever he could get rebate coupons on) and every one of them failed while under warranty.

I now use raid5 for important stuff and don't care - I expect every hard drive I buy to fail at least once in its lifetime so now I just purchase based on warranty. My Maxtors and Seagate all have five year warranties and I have three years or more on the three I'm presently using (Note that: they have all already been replaced once - every one of them not only failed, but failed within the first two years of use). I will say this: maxtor's warranty department is a LOT better than Seagate. It will royally suck if Seagate manages to buy them out because I *hate* dealing with Seagate's warranty department.

[futz]

All the IDE, ATA, SATA, SATA II stuff sorta confuses me. Which is the best of those? Are they just ways to connect the hard drive to the rest of the computer? Which is most popular now? Which is cheaper?
They are just different ways to interface hard drives or other devices to the computer.

IDE is the oldest interface in your list. It is being gradually phased out in favor of SATA/SATA-2. Nothing wrong with IDE, but SATA is nicer and faster. You'll also see IDE referred to as PATA (Parallel ATA) sometimes. IDE is the big wide 40/80 wire ribbon cables you've seen in your box. As Mstlyevil says, IDE is capable of 133MB/second.

SATA (Serial ATA) is the first generation of Serial ATA interface. It's capable of 150MB/second.

SATA cables are thin and flexible compared to IDE. They're about 3/8" wide or so. And the SATA spec allows them to be as long as 36", if I remember correctly, whereas the old IDE cables were limited to 18" max. Makes wiring big cases a lot easier. With the thin cables, airflow thru the case is much improved, plus they just look much better with all the windowed and lit up cases these days.

SATA-2 is pretty much the fastest interface of the list (at present). It supports hot-plugging and NCQ and is capable of transferring data faster than any present-day hard drive is able to (except for bursting from cache). It is capable of 300MB/second.

Hot plugging means you can plug and unplug drives with the power turned on.

NCQ (native command queuing) means that when the drive receives multiple requests to read or write data, it will re-order the requests so that it does the data read/writes in the most efficient way instead of just in the order they were received. It can save a lot of time and most often will make the drive quicker.

Read more at http://www.serialata.org/faqs.asp

[mstlyevil]

All the IDE, ATA, SATA, SATA II stuff sorta confuses me. Which is the best of those? Are they just ways to connect the hard drive to the rest of the computer? Which is most popular now? Which is cheaper?

SATA II is the better technology and the fastest. It runs at 300MB vs 150 MB for a SATA and 133MB for a IDE (PATA). First you have to know what your MOBO supports. If it is a SATA board, the SATA II drive is backwards compatible by changing a jumper setting on the drive. SATA II drives are pretty cheap right now because the market is flooded with them. Check your MOBO manual to see if it supports SATA or SATA II. If not then you will have no choice but to buy a IDE (PATA) drive or a controller card to run a SATA drive.

[23meg]

Since you have PROVEN your dishonesty by deleting a post of mine and editing your own i hope everyone realizes how dishonest you are and that your word doesn't mean shiat.
Atleast if you are going to say really bad things about someone on my topic, give us some specific examples of what said person did =Pxequence, the reference is to this thread (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=104943). I'm not a moderator and I can't remove posts, so BSDFreak is definitely wrong there, and I won't comment any further. Sorry for the disturbance.

[xequence]

Disturbance is ok if I know whats going on, as in this case =P


First you have to know what your MOBO supports.

Would most new motherboards support SATA? I am probably going to buy a computer soon...


Nothing wrong with IDE, but SATA is nicer and faster.

Are there noticable differences? As in, not numbers, but usage.

I have a 5 year old computer and it takes a half hour to cut and paste 3 GB from one partition to another.

[futz]

Would most new motherboards support SATA?
Yes, virtually ALL new mainboards have SATA connectors. I'm sure someone will find a board that contradicts me, but for the most part all do have SATA. SATA-2 is quite new tho, and some boards don't support it yet.


Are there noticable differences? As in, not numbers, but usage.
You won't notice any difference moving from IDE to SATA with equivalent drives, but if you're replacing an older IDE drive with a new SATA drive (or even with a new IDE drive), you almost certainly WILL notice a big difference. Modern hard drives are pretty much all faster than older ones. Bigger cache makes quite a difference for some things, and faster RPM's makes a big difference.

And SATA-2 should be good for around an average 20% more speed over SATA-1. That's a guesstimate, and will vary greatly depending on what you are doing with the drive at the time you're measuring.


I have a 5 year old computer and it takes a half hour to cut and paste 3 GB from one partition to another.
A lot of that will be that the computer itself is slow, tho faster drives make a big diff too. My WD Raptor's, for instance, are VERY speedy at file transfers (10000 RPM and 8MB buffers). Newer machines with dual-channel RAM and much much faster bus speeds are way speedier at stuff like that.

Another thing to take into account is that a big number of small files will take a HUGELY longer time to transfer than just a few BIG files. Much more overhead in the small files.

[mstlyevil]

I want to clarify one statement I made in a previous post.


WD SATA II drives meet or beat the raptors in most speed test

Raptors are still using SATA I interfaces. New models supporting SATA II should be on the market soon. When that happens, raptors will once again smoke anything on the market.

[futz]

I want to clarify one statement I made in a previous post.

Raptors are still using SATA I interfaces. New models supporting SATA II should be on the market soon. When that happens, raptors will once again smoke anything on the market.
My friend that sold me those 4 SATA-1 Raptors replaced them with new Maxtor (I think) SATA-2 NCQ drives. He's very pleased with their performance.

[mstlyevil]

My friend that sold me those 4 SATA-1 Raptors replaced them with new Maxtor (I think) SATA-2 NCQ drives. He's very pleased with their performance.

I was quite surprised when I done my research before buying a hard drive for my new computer I am putting together on friday. I read as many reviews as I could before deciding on a WD Caviar SE WD2500JS. I used price vs performance as my basis for buying this drive. I originally was considering a 36 GB Raptor until I read all the reviews on the SATA II drives I could find. It is amazing how much a fatter pipeline makes a difference on performance.

[futz]

I was quite surprised when I done my research before buying a hard drive for my new computer I am putting together on friday. I read as many reviews as I could before deciding on a WD Caviar SE WD2500JS. I used price vs performance as my basis for buying this drive. I originally was considering a 36 GB Raptor until I read all the reviews on the SATA II drives I could find. It is amazing how much a fatter pipeline makes a difference on performance.
The fat pipeline will make a difference only on cache bursting. So potentially you could get 8MB very very quickly if your cache hits. Streaming is limited by the drive's (and any hard drive's) relatively slow (in comparison to the interface capability) data transfer speed.

The other thing that'll make that drive quicker in many circumstances is NCQ.

On the other hand, the 2500JS has lower RPM's than the Raptor, so that slows things a tad. Buffers are equal.

So what did the reviewers and benchmarks say? I'd think, judging by the above stuff, that the 2500JS would maybe be just a little bit slower or that it'd be a wash, but I'm just guessing of course. No data to back my guess up.

[zenwhen]

Since you have PROVEN your dishonesty by deleting a post of mine and editing your own i hope everyone realizes how dishonest you are and that your word doesn't mean shiat.

Stop following him around posting this crap, now. He cannot edit your posts and has every right to edit his own. You have been publicly warned.

Also, adding an "a" to a swear doesn't make it any more cute. Can it.

[zenwhen]

I swear by Western Digital myself. Every brand has failures. There really aren't good numbers out there backing up a higher failure rate for any particular manufacturer that i have seen.

[mstlyevil]

The fat pipeline will make a difference only on cache bursting. So potentially you could get 8MB very very quickly if your cache hits. Streaming is limited by the drive's (and any hard drive's) relatively slow (in comparison to the interface capability) data transfer speed.

The other thing that'll make that drive quicker in many circumstances is NCQ.

On the other hand, the 2500JS has lower RPM's than the Raptor, so that slows things a tad. Buffers are equal.

So what did the reviewers and benchmarks say? I'd think, judging by the above stuff, that the 2500JS would maybe be just a little bit slower or that it'd be a wash, but I'm just guessing of course. No data to back my guess up.

It overall was a wash. Other drives like a seagate actually did better than the raptor, but they were way more expensive than the WD. The WD won IMHO because of the price vs performance factor. But one of the articles did state that the Raptor was still using a SATA I interface and that new Raptors were coming to market soon with a SATA II interface.

[futz]

It overall was a wash. Other drives like a seagate actually did better than the raptor, but they were way more expensive than the WD. The WD won IMHO because of the price vs performance factor. But one of the articles did state that the Raptor was still using a SATA I interface and that new Raptors were coming to market soon with a SATA II interface.
Ya, that makes sense. Performance-wise a wash, but definitely not cost/value-wise. If your mainboard supports SATA-2, they are definitely the way to go...

(Canadian prices)
$139 WD WD360GD 36.0GB 8MB SATA 10K rpm
$219 WD WD740GD 74.0GB 8MB SATA 10K rpm

$132 WD WD2500JS 250GB 8MB SATA II

[ubuntu_demon]

Since you have PROVEN your dishonesty by deleting a post of mine and editing your own i hope everyone realizes how dishonest you are and that your word doesn't mean shiat.


23meg has no powers to delete posts by other users. Only admins and moderators have that power.

[sapo]

I lost all my data because of a maxtor IDE drive that just DIED.

Now im stuck with samsung, they say that it is slow, but i feel safe with samsung spinpoint harddrives, i had one running 24/7 for 2 years without any problems, and now i bought a new SATA samsung HD, it r0x :D