Which HDD?

marauder

I just lost my HDD (makes a cool whistling sound) and I need to get a new one.

Eye

My preferance would be to go with a maxtor if i was you, they are extremly fast and reliable drives, i've got 3x40Gb Maxtors and not ever had any problems with them, oldest is running round about 2 years now, my old seagate 30Gb drive tho.... that was a piece of crap, it died on my twice, got it replaced but even the replacement one was a bit dodgy so passed it onto my brother

zAbbo

Depends on the capabilities of the drive
eg RPM etc.

marauder

I should have saind that I mean't all else being equal.
The specs and prices are pretty similar between them all.....

zAbbo

Well a 7200 RPM is better than a 5400 one. Go for a 7200 if you can and i widn`t be overly worried about the capacity of the hard drive. I am a fan of WD tho.

JustHalf

Although I've yet to stress it, I'm very happy with my new WD800JB.. the 80Gig "Special Edition" drive. Windows boot time is cut significantly compared to my 40Gb Quantum Fireball Plus AS.

You do know it's the fastest IDE drive on the planet?

marauder

Yeah,
I just took at look over on storagereview and WD seems to be the way to go....

thanks

Stephen

I like IBM deskstars. I've a 40gb 60GXP here and its pretty sweet.

Straker

Seagate... fast, quiet, and cool (as in... the opposite to warm/hot). :P

In all honesty, any of the brands you've chosen will do... aslong as you has a spec, and price, in mind.

Re. IBM's: did IBM sort out that problem with some of their drives... or was it just a bad batch? I remember watch the prices fall through the floor because of the "fault".

Gerry

I bought another ibm anyway, I don't think any problems have cropped up with the 120gxp so far.

TacT

Seagate had major problems with one of their line of hdd's recently, I'd go with Western Digital in your position, fast, quiet and reliable.

I don't trust maxtor

Moriarty

I'd go for IBM drives if you can, they run perfect - fast, quiet and reliable (excluding the dodgy batch a while back). One thing about IBM hard drives is they are prone to running hot (temperature wise) when they are under load. Shouldnt be a problem if you have decent air flow through your system though..

steve-hosting36

I'd agree with Moriarty,

We use all IBM drives, the 20,40 and 60Gb 7200rpm models are extremely solid and reliable. The 120Gb looks juicy, but the though off all that data on one disk makes me nervous

On the heat issue, it's not a problem as long as you've got good fans and a tidy set-up (as in tidy wiring => clear airflow)

HTH, Steve

Gerry

To my surprise, the new 120gxp runs extremely cool. I wrote some simple scripts to copy files from one drive to the other, and the drive was barely warm to the touch, and registered 33 degrees max on the SMART temperature monitor.

Saruman

I voted IBM... some mixed results here... Seagate also good drives... not a WD fan and certainly not maxtor... reason for maxtor is simple... Maybe they ere good once but they took over Quantum and most of their new drives are rebadged Quantums and Quantum's are Shíte.

azezil

anyone but maxtor, the horrors i've seen...

Rew

Nothing could possibly measure up to the WD special editions with the 8mb cache....

http://www.komplett.ie/k/k.asp?r=1&action=info&s=fp&p=19613

Gerry

The IBM is almost as fast, and is cheaper.

marauder

Thanks for all the advice

I got the 80GB WD Special Edition ... SWEET

po0k

Why is everyone knocking the Maxotrs?
They're decent enough now.
It was the older drives that were shíte.
I've 30G and 80Gig maxtors, the smaller of which is over 2 years old. Stills runs sweet.

PPC

Yeah i'd go for a Maxtor anyday.

The IBM's are ment to have major faults but can be fixed by formatting and proper cooling i think.
I'm using Seagates but I voted Maxtor.

daveJAM

Maxtor.
Even their replacement service kicks ass. Though I've not heard of many people actually have to use it.

c0y0te

I voted Maxtor, because of all the ****e on the tech boards about IBM disk drive problems and recalls. Have you checked the issues on some of these forums (like Scan for example).

Avoid IBM. WD or Maxtor, but my preference is maxtor. Just ordered 2 x 80gb 7200rpm maxtors myself on the strength of it.

c0y0te

leeroybrown

I voted WD but only because of the prowess of the Special Edition.

I should be getting my 120Gig WD Caviar Special Edition on monday or tuesday.

Otherwise I'd probably have voted IBM. I have a 60GXP 41.2Gig in my system at the moment and am very happy with it performance-wise.

I did have a lot of hassle with its 61.5Gig sister drive but that was a damaged in shipping problem and the hasle was with the very evil scan.co.uk and in no way damages my respect for IBM.

The 75GXP seems to have had quite a few problems but the 120GXP (one of which(80 Gig) I recently helped to install in a high usage Linux Server) seem to be A-OK.

like Scan for example

That would include me - I'll never forget the way they ****ed me over!

The current crop of Maxtors seem to be a lot better than the crap of old and there seem to be very few horror stories about them. If you want reasonably piced storage they seem pretty good now.

Seagate are putting out some very good drives too - they always seem to be the ones to set the new size limits for IDE drives.

Nietzschean

Originally posted by Moriarty
I'd go for IBM drives if you can, they run perfect - fast, quiet and reliable (excluding the dodgy batch a while back). One thing about IBM hard drives is they are prone to running hot (temperature wise) when they are under load. Shouldnt be a problem if you have decent air flow through your system though..

cept that thing with the bad batch where i got one from the bad batch, returned it and they gave me a new drive which was still bad, which i had to return again. Still though very good after sales service there I Can't complain there although it does run very very hot......burn yer hands hot

scsi 36gb ibm btw

po0k

10K rpm scsi?

Gerry

The famous "bad batch" was a large proportion of the 75GXP's ever produced. The 75GXP an IDE drive, so dunno what you are referring to with the 36GB SCSI ultrastar zx or whatever it is.

byte

Wondered if ya can help me. I intend buying a good 7200rpm HDD (looking at IBM Deskstar 120GB @ €190) but if I get it would I have to reinstall Windows (98) or could I copy my existing drive to my new one? Also, is there any limitations to what my OS will work with? I don't want a nice big HDD with half of it being ignored! :rolleyes:

byte

Originally posted by leeroybrown
I voted WD but only because of the prowess of the Special Edition.

I should be getting my 120Gig WD Caviar Special Edition on monday or tuesday.

I have ordered 80GB equivalent from Komplett last night and hope to get it tomorrow. Let's hope it works happily with my pooter. I just need 2 know can I copy OS and everything straight from my current drive to my new drive possibly by DOS??

leeroybrown

Dunno bout DOS.

Maybe fdisk has the ability to copy partitions exactly.

I know Partition Magic can do it.

byte

Well, assuming new drive is F, then this should work via DOS:

xcopy c:\ f:\

Dunno about registry though. I don't wanna reinstall everything.

Felix Unger

I was thinking of going for a Maxtor, as they seem to be the only
manufacturer supporting ATA133 atm, so seeing as the mobo supports it I thought I'd try it. Any opinions?

DiamondMax+ D740X 80GB UDMA133

I was intending partitioning it into 2 30GBs for FAT32 and a 20GB NTFS Win2000 test partition. (Still running 98 SE as main OS)


IrishByte - The only limitation is with FAT32, it's recommended not to have partitions above 32GB as it adversely affects performance
and wastes storage space when storing small files. All this is from memory as in work at the moment so I could be wrong on that.

JustHalf

ATA/133 is overrated. Most drives never even exceed the UDMA-33 limits, let alone UDMA-66 or ATA/100.

My advice would be to look around for the fastest drive in your price range rather than whether or not it had ATA/133. Unless you want a storage capacity greater than 137Gigs.

The fastest IDE drives at the moment are the WD Special Editions. I have the 80Gig version myself, and I am quite impressed by the speed increase it gave me in general windows use. WD-Tach thinks it's 33% faster on average than my 40Gig Quantum Fireball AS.

byte

Originally posted by JustHalf
The fastest IDE drives at the moment are the WD Special Editions. I have the 80Gig version myself, and I am quite impressed by the speed increase it gave me in general windows use. WD-Tach thinks it's 33% faster on average than my 40Gig Quantum Fireball AS.

Now that's what I like to hear:p Mine didn't come today but maybe tomorrow. My current HDD is a 10GB Quantum too and it's terribly noisy and slow.

Pepe LeFrits

I have a Quantum Fireball 40gb (nearly a year old), a Western Digital caviar 40gb (6 months old) and a 8gb IBM (4 years old). All working and have worked flawlessly since i got them. And that's all I have to add to this thread.

byte

Well my new WD HDD came last Wednesday but it's sitting idle at the moment as it won't work as slave with my Quantum. After much swearing I managed to get the drive partitioned and formatted but only on its own as Master. I noticed 5 pairs of jumper pins on WD but only 4 pairs on Quantum. 3 of the pairs on Quantum was S/CS/M. The WD on the other hand had an option "Master with Slave present" so I guess the Q don't have this option and my WD will have to be Master.

I'd still expect my PC to boot though with the 2 connected but it doesn't . Anyway, either way, the WD is staying as it's extremely quiet. All I need now is to put software on it!

OT: how do I enter DOS from startup? Which button must I press? I assume its one of the function buttons.

JustHalf

F8 will do the trick.