What Brand of Internal Hard Drives are the best for Ubuntu?

[acelin]

What Brand of Internal Hard Drives are the best for Ubuntu?

[Whiffle]

a hard drive is a hard drive is a hard drive. IF anything, you might have trouble with the chipset on the motherboard, but even then I'd doubt it.

[smoker]

i tend to avoid these now!
http://hackedgadgets.com/2006/05/20/world%e2%80%99s-first-hard-drive-1956/

:-)

[twin_57103]

Although any drive is compatible, you may get better (or worse) support from certain companies.

I'd avoid Western Digital - they seem to forget that there are operating systems other than Windows. I had a Linux drive fail and they wanted me to use a Windows utility for diagnostics (to their credit, they did replace the drive on warranty). I've also noticed that their packaging comes with system requirements in terms of Windows only.

[acelin]

What about Seagate? I have heard the same thing about them...

See I had a WD drive that the Windows partition stopped working on but the Ubuntu installation on it was fine. I dont know if this has WD's crappy drive doing this, or a problem I have heard about with aving ext 3 and NTFS on the same drive...

[Whiffle]

The seagate momentus in my laptop works perfectly, including hdaps head parking. Both maxtors in my desktop work fine as well. I have a toshiba in my laptop-wannabe-server, no issues there either.

[SuperSon!c]

hdd's are not specific to OS's, so just get a brand name w/ a reasonable price. storage is retardedly cheap, so just do it.

[zekopeko]

I'm Seagate all the way. Can't beat 5 year warranty

[DBrocks]

Picked up a 500gb WD for about 100 bucks a few weeks ago. Works like a champ.

[twin_57103]

What about Seagate? I have heard the same thing about them...

See I had a WD drive that the Windows partition stopped working on but the Ubuntu installation on it was fine. I dont know if this has WD's crappy drive doing this, or a problem I have heard about with aving ext 3 and NTFS on the same drive...

As far as I know, there shouldn't be any problem with having the two file systems side-by-side (that's what I'm doing on my new Hitachi drive).

I can't really recommend a better option, only relate the bad experience that I've had. I haven't had any Seagate drives, much less had trouble with them. You could always contact customer service and ask them how far they'd support diagnostics on a non-Windows system and see what they have to say. Unfortunately, industry-wide support for Linux systems is bound to be less fluent than Windows simply because it's less used.

The maxim that "you get what you pay for" is probably true when it comes to hard drives as well as many other things in life - the cheap ones are cheap for a reason.

After two nasty hard drive failures (both WD products, but that's because they're all I've had until recently) I'm pretty hard-core about backups. If you want to be extra-careful, backup important data to optical media and/or an external hard drive. You can also consider imaging your system for easier recovery. Also keep two physical drives and keep the important data on the secondary drive, which should be less prone to wear (if you dual-boot, install both OS's on the primary drive). [I know this is a tangent, but it's stuff I'm working on after just recovering from the last bad crash]

Hope that helps!

[wolfen69]

just be careful about what external HD you might purchase. Seagate Free Agent and WD MyBook are known not to work in linux.

[acelin]

Getting an internal HD.

[tadcan]

The only issue I had with Hard drives is dropping into the busybox shell when I was installing. Having said that its an obscure problem and the solution is on the forum now. It was a Hitachi H/D so I'd avoid those. My seagate to replace it worked.

I also have a W/D MyBook, works fine for me.

[gn2]

Samsung hard drives are the best although they're not always as readily available as other brands.

[SuperSon!c]

just be careful about what external HD you might purchase. Seagate Free Agent and WD MyBook are known not to work in linux.

the mybook seems to work fine under ubuntu, but after googling seagate's free agent, it seems to have some issues:

http://help.lockergnome.com/general/Free-Agent-Seagate-snubs-mac-ftopict54034.html

anybody successfully using a free agent?

[LaRoza]

Samsung hard drives are the best although they're not always as readily available as other brands.

I love Samsung monitors, but I never saw hard drives. I'll keep an eye out for them.

I use Western Digital for my hard drives.

For internal drives, the important things are the interface (SATA), and speed.

[acelin]

Ok thanks guys! I think I will buy Seagate, as they have a longer warranty.

[gn2]

For internal drives, the important things are the interface (SATA), and speed.

You forgot reliability.
The Samsung hard drive I'm using currently is one that came with the first PC I bought, that was in 2001 and the drive has been in use most days since.

[twin_57103]

You forgot reliability.
The Samsung hard drive I'm using currently is one that came with the first PC I bought, that was in 2001 and the drive has been in use most days since.

I agree! While storage may be cheap, fixing your system after a hard drive crash isn't pretty, even if you have good backups. I've had multiple system crashes from bad drives - I'd rather get something that's high-quality than something cheap that will give out in less than a year (I've had it happen twice!).