Best HDD of these two

[kodak]

:) i'm looking at a new hard drive for a PC and boiled it down to these two
the Hitachi is ATA 133 so will be a pinch faster than the Western Digital but the Western is of course renowned for quality and reliability
for me it's a close call and i ask if anyone has any thoughts that could push it one way or another?
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?HIT-HD808P
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?WD-80JB

btw i put this in the cafe as it's not directly related to an Ubuntu question so to any mods feel free to move it

[maniacmusician]

:) i'm looking at a new hard drive for a PC and boiled it down to these two
the Hitachi is ATA 133 so will be a pinch faster than the Western Digital but the Western is of course renowned for quality and reliability
for me it's a close call and i ask if anyone has any thoughts that could push it one way or another?
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?HIT-HD808P
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?WD-80JB

btw i put this in the cafe as it's not directly related to an Ubuntu question so to any mods feel free to move it
Are you building a new computer, or buying a new hard drive for an old computer? If I were building a new one, I wouldn't choose either of those, really, due to their low storage capacity and antiquated interfaces.

But they should both be around the same. I'd go with WD, since they've never let me down.

[kodak]

Are you building a new computer, or buying a new hard drive for an old computer? If I were building a new one, I wouldn't choose either of those, really, due to their low storage capacity and antiquated interfaces.

But they should both be around the same. I'd go with WD, since they've never let me down.

the computer is 4 or 5 years old and 80 gig is more than enough for some people :lolflag:

[DUDE_2000]

I personally don't like WD because they have put, and are probably planning to put drm on their drives (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/07/western_digital_drm_crippled_harddrive/), so I would go with the other one.
If you want to know what people think of these drives look for them on something like tiger direct, and see what people who have bought the drives have said

[Omnios]

I have been using a WD 120Gig for about 5 years now and its still rock solid and they have a good reliability rating. As for the other you might want to research there reliability online and reviews.

[koleoptero]

The maxtor one is notably faster, and I have a maxtor 4 years now with absolutely no probs.

[tipi]

I've seen so many Maxtor Drives go down , i will never ever buy one
mysef.
Would go for the WD :)

[maniacmusician]

the computer is 4 or 5 years old and 80 gig is more than enough for some people :lolflag:
Fair enough :) I'm a big fan of buying more storage than you think you need, to really future proof your system...more so with desktops than with laptops. Buying larger hard drives rather than multiple smaller ones leaves more ports open for possible expansion later, if needed.

Although I can certainly understand buying a smaller hard drive with an older system like that, since you're more than likely to buy/build a new computer in the next 2 years.

What I like to do with older computers is usually turn them into a file server once I build a newer one, and in that case I buy larger hard drives for them also.

DUDE_2000 makes somewhat of a good point; it isn't the best thing to support vendors that make DRMd devices, but I guess I can rationalize that; I plan on avoiding any of their DRM-enabled devices and telling other people to do so as well. I also think that with the recent trend in turning away from DRM (which larger corporations are starting to support), they'll probably get the idea and abandon DRM.

I really only see this being an issue with external or NAS drives at the moment...I don't think that the technology that they're using can be feasibly implemented in internal drives at the moment, due to several factors; they need hardware that is capable of reading and interpreting data from the file system. For this they need more memory (as in cache) than is currently available in hard drives, especially if they want to do it without bottlenecking the hard drives performance. They would also need some sort of processor with a TPM module, I believe.

Most hard drives that you buy nowadays only have a chip that recieves instruction sets from the computer and carries them out with the magnetic needle on the disk platter. To add all hardware that they would need to do what they did with their external drive is really not possible without increasing the physical size of the hard drive (which will never happen). They could scale it down to a smaller size and try to cram it in, but this would result in higher production costs, and thus, higher costs for the consumer with no visible benefits; no one in their right mind would buy them, and sales would be poor.

There's also the question of what file system is being used on the hard drive. At a stretch, they might support FAT32 and NTFS, but they probably only support NTFS...so if you install EXT3 or a similar file system on it, all their DRM would essentially become useless.

[maniacmusician]

I've seen so many Maxtor Drives go down , i will never ever buy one
mysef.
Would go for the WD :)
Ditto. Maxtor drives are horrid. I bought 3 that all died within six months of purchase. Never touching it again. I buy mainly WD; they have been the most resilient and long-lasting drives that I have ever owned. I also bought a 500GB Samsung drive about a year ago that is running nice and cool and fast, so they might be on my list for future purchases.

I used to buy from Seagate as well, but with their latest fiasco with the Mac laptops, I'm a bit wary of them.

[articpenguin]

i go with seagate all the way. Ive had 2 maxtor drives in the past and they failed i n 2 months. I have a 80GB seagate hdd that i bought 4 years ago and it still runs.

[mips]

Ditto. Maxtor drives are horrid. I bought 3 that all died within six months of purchase. Never touching it again. I buy mainly WD; they have been the most resilient and long-lasting drives that I have ever owned. I also bought a 500GB Samsung drive about a year ago that is running nice and cool and fast, so they might be on my list for future purchases.

I used to buy from Seagate as well, but with their latest fiasco with the Mac laptops, I'm a bit wary of them.

+1 Seen way to many maxtors die in my lifetime

I would go with WD although there is nothing wrong with Hitachi or Seagate.

[maniacmusician]

+1 Seen way to many maxtors die in my lifetime

I would go with WD although there is nothing wrong with Hitachi or Seagate.
Seagate did have a recent macbook incidient, where a certain instruction set, or a certain series of them in a certain order, would cause the drive to go berserk. This happened to the point that the needle inside the drive would actually snap off, and bounce around inside, scratching up all the disc platters, and reducing the possibility of data recovery to some insanely low percentage (0.00000001%?). I remember reading that if you took it a data recovery center that would salvage it electron by electron, you may have a chance of getting some of it back, but that costs a huge amount of money and the odds are still less than likely.

So I'm planning sticking with WD and Samsung for a while...I don't really have much experience with Hitachi at all.

One time, when I was strapped for cash, I went for the cheapest hard drive I could find, which happened to be made by a company called ExcelStor...that drive was awful. It was loud, didn't run very cool, and eventually died on me after hanging in for a while. So I would stay away from them too.

[insane_alien]

go with the hitachi, marginally cheaper, marginally faster. don't think any differnce in quality would be noticable.

[red_five]

WD: OK, I guess. I've had 2, one of them never ran again after a few months of no usage. It was an early 3GB drive, probably some new tech in there. My current 80GB drive is in a home server, and seems to run well.
Maxtor: I've had pretty good luck with them overall. I had a 4.3GB and a 17GB that ran literally for years before dying.
Seagate: I've got a couple right now, and they are really good.
Hitachi: DEMON-SPAWN! Their desktop and laptop models used to be co-owned and -developed by IBM. You know. The "Death Star" drives. I went through 3 of them in the space of a year, and will never buy another one, I don't care that IBM divested themselves. If I buy a device that has one in it, I will replace the drive(s) before using the device. Like Iomega's new NAS device that has 4 drives and an embedded Linux OS.
Fujitsu: seems OK, never really seen too many problems with these.
Samsung: same as Fujitsu.
Toshiba: Their laptop drives aren't too bad, but I've gone through 2 or 3 of them in recent years. I'd choose them above Hitachi, though.

The problem with the IBM/Hitachi Death Star drives was that the platters were made out of glass. When the drive would warm up through usage, the platters would deform enough that the data tracks no longer lined up with the head locations, and they wouldn't allow the OS to boot. If you did a low-level format with IBM's utility, it would rewrite the track info and thus the drive would work again for a few weeks. You could repeat the cycle a few times, but after a while it just wouldn't work anymore.

[mips]

Well aware of the Death Star issues but it was quite a while back though. The only 2.5" HD I buy are the Hitachi Travelstars and nothing else. For 3.5" drives I use WD or Seagate and nothing else.