Recommend me a Hard Drive!

Duffman

Hey,

I've run out of storage after a few months of exceeding my download cap..
I've never bought a hard drive so I'm looking for some suggestions.

What I need: A drive purely for storage, so reliability is the most important thing.. I'm not pushed about acoustics or performance (even though most of the best value drives on Komplett seem to be 7200rpm/8meg anyway).

I'm going to put it into a desktop and access it across a network for the moment but will probably get a usb cable/cradle dealy for my laptop eventually.

So Maxtor, Western Digital or Seagate from Komplett? Or even that Samsung drive from Aldi?

Suggestions appreciated

lazygit

Me self and one of the mate's bought 4 of these a few monts ago...
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=118031&cks=PRL

3 of them failed.

Try one of these maybe?
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=112810&cks=PRL

Dempsey

Id recommend Western Digital drives, i have 5 of their drives, no problems whatsoever over the past 3 years

BloodBath

Both Samsung and Western Digital are great. I'd avod maxtor and seagate.


BloodBath

ViperVenoM

yep i got a couple of 200gb WD (as you can see in my sig :rolleyes: ) for me server, doing a great job..seem better than the maxtors in my main rig ...dunno whether to swap heh

but yeh i can vouch for WD's ..great drives

MazdaMan

I have a Samsung 120gb drive 7200rpm 8mb cache, got it 6 months ago, it's a flyer and hasn't let me down yet....PCWorld have them in the component section (Non fancy brown box section) of their shop for €105

Duffman

Thanks for replies, think I'm going to go for a WD.

tman

WDs are pretty damn noisy though.

get a seagate if its just going to be used for secondary storage

vibe666

damn, too slow. i was just going to add another WD's are great post.

seriously though, i have 5 40gig wd's and they have worked very hard (video capture and editing and they are still going strong. 4 of them are going to be used for a 0+1 raid set as soon as i get my sata converters for them, and i've just bought a 200gig WD which i now have all my data on (which was spread over the others up till now).

great drives, very quiet (compared to seagates and maxtors) considering they aren't advertised as such.

highly recommended. A+

ViperVenoM

i can just add that if WD's are meant to be loud then my Maxtors are playing up because my WD drives are MUCH quieter

dunno but if this is noisey..its the sort i like..i can hardly hear em

RuggieBear

I cant hear my WD harddrive at all....the ****ing racket from my three 80mm fans makes my harddrive noise inconsequential

Richard Dower

I'd suggest getting two Western Digital Raptors, 74Gb version and run them in RAID 0....just like me!

Creamy Goodness

Richard Dower wrote:

I'd suggest getting two Western Digital Raptors, 74Gb version and run them in RAID 0....just like me!

although that's an excellant setup of drive i don't think the orignal poster had in mind to spend 400+ euros on two 74gig hard drives.

he said he's a heavy downloader so gb/rpm/cache are most important.
also he doesn't mention if he has SATA or not

but from my experience you can't go wrong with Western digital (another vote for them )

vibe666

Richard Dower wrote:

I'd suggest getting two Western Digital Raptors, 74Gb version and run them in RAID 0....just like me!

you'd be better off with 4x 40gig WD's and have them in raid0+1. you'd get better performance and a bit of fault tolerance, and save yourself €200 to boot.

not to mention they'd be quieter. :rolleyes:

TimTim

I don't see what people have a problem with maxtor, I have bought 5 maxtor drives over the last 2 years varying in size and speeds and I've never had any problems with them at all.

BloodBath

great drives, very quiet (compared to seagates and maxtors) considering they aren't advertised as such.

Seagates are the quietest drives out of them all but their performance is piss poor. Almost as bad as the maxtors.

The Samsungs are very quiet and perform almost as well as the WD. You can't go wrong with either.

Count yourself lucky timtim, I know plenty of people who have had maxtors die on them after about a year of use. They also perform the worst out of all the drives listed above.


BloodBath

TimTim

BloodBath wrote:

Count yourself lucky timtim, I know plenty of people who have had maxtors die on them after about a year of use. They also perform the worst out of all the drives listed above.

BloodBath

I dunno why but I am a damn lucky guy when it comes to pc parts, I also have a Q-Tec psu! and that has never gave me any problems, come to think of it the only faulty piece of hardware I ever remember having was a stick of ram.

BloodBath

Here's the conclusion to one round-up I was reading.

http://www.nordichardware.com/reviews/storage/2004/SATA_ROUNDUP/index.php?ez=16

So the hitachi's are excellent performers apparently. Topping this test easily. They weren't tested in the other roundup I was reading. There are no maxtor drives in this test but they usually finish at the bottom. I'm surprised that the 7200rpm western digitals finish bottom in this test. Maybe it's just the particular model. The samsungs do great as always and the seagates pick up the quietest drive award as always.

So it seems Samsung, hitachi and western digital are the ones to go for.


BloodBath

vishal

from what i have read most reviews are very conflicting in what they recommend as a harddrive. from the reviews that i have read maxtors are very fast drives.
i have had 4 seagates over the last couple of years and they have all failed.
i have a samsung and put in to alot of use and it is still going strong. it is a shame komplett don't sell samsungs.

i have also read that raid 0 makes no use in either loading up games quicker or desktop use. all the benchmarks that are used by reviewers are all very synthetic. they should use realworld tests and see by how many seconds windows has loader up quicker or how fast games load up quickly.

Dempsey

With SP1, windows was loaded after 2 bars. SP2 now loads in about 5 now. RAID will only make a difference when using programs that require alot of hdd accessing. Small stripe sizes gave me unreal benchmarks. Now im using 128k and its gives me the benchmark of a single drive(HD Tach)

Canis Lupus

I too vote for WD, have two of their drives. One ive had over.... 2 or 3 years I reckon and its still fine and im getting 2*200gb WD drives next week.