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Hard Drive Recommendations
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Author:  spudthedestroyer [ Fri Sep 24, 2004 3:56 pm ]
Post subject:  Hard Drive Recommendations
Just looking into buying for HDD for my RAID that's going unused atm. I'm planning on buying 2 now, and then 2 sometime later in the year.

I currently have IDE Maxtor Dimandmax9 60GB and 160Gb drives, and Maxtor 200GB, WD 250GB SATA drives. The RAID is a 66/100/133 2 channel, 4 drive HPT135 so it can pretty much take any standard IDE hard drive.

I'm looking at capacity and low noise, since its RAID they'll be fast even with ATA100, but the extra speed for 133 won't go amiss of course. 8mb Cache is preferable.

Anyways, I was looking at the Maxtor DiamondMax9 160GB drives, I mean they are fast and quiet and the capacity is large, but something with a larger capacity would be nice, but the DiamondMax range finishes at 160GB and the next up is MaxLineII, which i know little about noise wise.

So do you have any recommendations for a hard drive thats:
  • Large Capacity, I think about 160GB minimum
  • IDE ATA100/133 only
  • 8MB cache
  • Quiet
?

Also any online retailers (UK only) would be nice. I'm looking at http://www.komplett.co.uk and http://www.dabs.com atm.

Recommendations and reviews welcome :)
Author:  John_Doe [ Sat Sep 25, 2004 4:13 am ]
Post subject: 
Well, I've got 2 Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160GB S-ATA 8MB cache 7200RPM. Don't know about the noise level, as I don't have anything to compare it to, but it's not anoying at least. I found the biggest noisemaker in my machine was the graphics card fan. Now I have one without fan, and it's very silent!!

I've never had any trouble with these hd's, yet. Very satisfied.
Author:  Dia [ Sat Sep 25, 2004 10:09 am ]
Post subject: 
The one I just bought was a Western Digital, 120gb, 8mb cache, 7200rpm.
Very quiet and cheap too, got it from komplett.

There are larger ones available at a good price (about ?60 for 160gb I think). Not sure how they compare in price to the Maxtors, but I'd certainly recommend them for speed and silence.
Author:  satan [ Sat Sep 25, 2004 12:54 pm ]
Post subject: 
Westerns are my next buy when my maxtors fail like I read they will.
Author:  spudthedestroyer [ Sat Sep 25, 2004 1:46 pm ]
Post subject: 
Quote:
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160GB S-ATA 8MB cache 7200RPM


Yeah I got a 200GB one, very cool drive, but i'm after IDE, I already have two SATA :)

I heard WD were nice, but the only hdds I've had fail on my is a 14 year old Seagate (I think this still works tbh) and a 20GB IBM Deskstar (Worst drives ever btw).

My Maxtor got a disc error, but a soft-format was all it needed.

So on brand reputation I've had no problems with WD or Maxtor, Maxtors have that ace liquid system so they are really quiet and are ATA133, WD do pretty well in all the tests even though they are ATA100 max.
Author:  John_Doe [ Sat Sep 25, 2004 3:30 pm ]
Post subject: 
You kidding? When I looked into buying a new disk, I could find nothing but complaints about WD. Several places talks about the 'bad rep' of WD, on acount of the often ocurring total crashes.
Author:  carlos66 [ Sat Sep 25, 2004 3:57 pm ]
Post subject: 
Dia wrote:
The one I just bought was a Western Digital, 120gb, 8mb cache, 7200rpm.

I've got one one these, also one Seagate (same specs) and one smaller Seagate - well, each of them works fine :)

I personally would go for the one with longest warranty
Author:  Purple.Nightmare [ Sat Sep 25, 2004 8:42 pm ]
Post subject: 
well i never had a Seagate drive fail on me (over a dozen owned over time) may not b the fastest but for me have def been the most reliable.

2 out of 3 WD drives i've owned died on me (physical probs).

Maxtor r ok, but both i own seem to run very hot for a HDD!!

got an 80GB Ibm deskstar and may not b the fastest drive but still running well after 3 years

dont touch fujitsu drives even with yr mates pc!! :)
Author:  spudthedestroyer [ Sat Sep 25, 2004 9:08 pm ]
Post subject: 
Hmm... looks like a maxtor again then, the only one people haven't complained about :lol:

John_Doe, Well i did some reading of the reviews at places like tom's hardware, they "win" every single comparison review (ie. highest benchmark specs), but it was a friend who says they were the current highest performers. I tend to by Maxtor myself

Purple.Nightmare, IBM lost their reputation with the original disasterous de<s>sk</s>athstars ;) They need to have outstanding reviews for me to invest in ibm again.
Author:  John_Doe [ Sun Sep 26, 2004 12:30 am ]
Post subject: 
Well my boss also has a small computer hardware company, almost just for fun... He doesn't make much money from it, but it stays alive, and he gets great prices himself...

Anyway, I can always try out whatever I want, before I buy it. So I tried out a 200gb WD IDE disk, and had some minor problems with partitioning it. Thus I searched around a little and found many many other people who were complaining about WD. I also posted on some hardware tech help forum, and everyone adviced against buying WD. It might get good reviews at tests, but they never test longivity. Most complaints were just about crashes as far as I can remember, and many said it had a reputation for being highly unstable..
Author:  ThEdEaDLiVe [ Sun Sep 26, 2004 12:37 am ]
Post subject: 
Well shit i just bought one recently and i wish i would have known this about WD before. So far its been excellent, well at least compared to my old drive. I mainly noticed a huge improvement when unpacking rar sets off newsgroups. With my old one it would take 6 minutes minimum with a 700mb rar set and my new one takes only about 45 secs.

But if would have known about the longevity problems and crashes i probably would have went with something else. I guess i should have started a topic like this a few weeks ago.
Author:  karstmobile [ Sun Sep 26, 2004 7:58 am ]
Post subject: 
I've always been happy with WD. Zero problems with ones I've owned and ones put in for friends. When I finally get my new computer built, it will have 2 raptors in a raid 0 as the main drives.
Author:  spudthedestroyer [ Sun Sep 26, 2004 9:59 am ]
Post subject: 
John, wait you went searching for an answer to a problem, and you read all about problems? ;) That sounds pretty normal to be honest, that's what you'll get if you search for the same thing on any company (unless your meaning there's a hell of a lot more comparatively on WD?) :) Its the exact same for every drive on the market, you'll get a whole host of complaints about it, but if you can point me to an article / site about the problems I'll bear it in mind (since I can then contradict the advice of some geeks at uni)... but if you search for problems, all you find is problems in my experience.

That advice certainly goes against everything I've read (or been told more accurately) on the matter anyway.

Long life wise, I'm surprised if any of them last over 5 years. All of them come with 3 year warrantys nowadays, but still its a lot of hassle later down the line... I'll bear it in mind, but it does kind of contradict the comments I've had about WD being the best drive makers around.
Author:  spudthedestroyer [ Sun Sep 26, 2004 10:28 am ]
Post subject: 
Anyone know anything about these?
http://www.dabs.com/uk/channels/compone ... klinx=39NH

Sounds too good to be true, 250GB, 7200rpm and 16mb Cache!?!

?117 is too much for me to buy 2 on faith :lol: None in stock though, just the SATA models :(


I found this review, saying that its a huge drive, and whilst it isn't the specs of the raptor (7200 vs 1000, large vs small), they are comparative in performance, and the bonus here is size :) Seems to be very quiet too :)
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content ... e%5Ftest=1
The review is for the SATA versions primarily, but I don't require any atm, just IDE.

Infact its pretty confident in that review that as far as my specs posted in the first post go, it meets them all by far:
Quote:
Maxtor?s introduction of a 16MB cache buffer on their new DiamondMax 10 line of drives will no doubt kick start the rest of the hard drive industry to follow, especially since the performance of these drives appears to be pretty fantastic considering it?s still based 7,200 RPM spindle speed technology. The DiamondMax 10 brings along some important changes to this line of hard drives which catapults Maxtor to the top of the technology ladder.

Our benchmarks have shown that raw performance levels of the DiamondMax 10 are not up to par with Western Digital?s Raptor, but that?s not incredibly surprising considering the 33% difference in spindle speed. Still, the DiamondMax is without a doubt the fastest 7,200 RPM drive we?ve ever tested. While performance levels are slightly below the Raptor, DiamondMax 10 series drives still have some very important factors going for them, like current capacity levels up to 300GB (in comparison to the Raptor?s 74GB), and a price per gigabyte level well below Western Digital?s Raptor ($0.98 / GB to $3.30 /GB).

In addition, the slower 7,200 RPM spindle speed allows for very low noise levels for such a high performance disk. Surprisingly though, the DiamondMax 10 drives run very hot to the touch, even hotter than our 10,000 RPM Raptor drives. According to our S.M.A.R.T monitoring software, the DiamondMax drive was running at over 10C higher (54C to 43C) temperatures during our testing compared to the Raptor. While this surprised us at first, when you consider Western Digital is dealing with only two small platters compared to three large platters, it?s easy to see how thermals can be higher with the DiamondMax. In addition, the Raptor has integrated heatsink fins right on the drive, so that no doubt helps. We would recommend some sort of active cooling on these drives ? even if it?s a low speed fan blowing at ~1000 RPM or so ? just to keep airflow moving.

As for Native Command Queuing, well, we were a bit disappointed with our results given all the hype surrounding the technology. The majority of our benchmarks showed slower performance levels with NCQ enabled, although some of our benchmarks do show some rays of home. I liken NCQ to Hyper-Threading ? you really don?t see performance increased when you?re running a single application, but when you?re running a lot of applications simultaneously, things just ?feel? smoother. I went ahead and installed an OS on one of the DiamondMax 10 drives with NCQ and another without, and the drive with NCQ enabled did seem much faster when loading a lot of applications at once. Still, we?re thrilled that this technology is finally making it down to the consumer level, even if it?s only truly available for those who own Socket-775 Pentium 4 systems at this time.

In our opinion, the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 is the best 7,200 RPM drive on the market, bar none. We?re guessing both Western Digital and Seagate will no doubt respond with force within the next two months.


I guess I'll get two of these....
Author:  ThEdEaDLiVe [ Sun Sep 26, 2004 5:58 pm ]
Post subject: 
I wonder then if you shouldn't wait a couple months or so to see what WD and others come out with to counter the DiamondMax 10 line. Or are you like me and can't wait for new hardware? :)
Author:  ohgodnotanotherone [ Sun Sep 26, 2004 6:11 pm ]
Post subject: 
LMAO !!

My 80 gig WD is one noisy fellow....

Clucky chuncky & high pitching on a hot summer day.....sometimes goes > PONK < as if the header is rammed into the side :lol: :lol: :lol:

Must be swarming with bvad sectors but scandisk reported everything AOK when tested...

Have made the step to seagate myself , a 160 gig only to discover my bios don't support > 137gig goddammit :evil:
Author:  d0c [ Sun Sep 26, 2004 6:27 pm ]
Post subject: 
i have had 2 western digital 8mb cache and 1 2mb cache all on 7200RPM, very quiet in the beginning but very anoying after a year. all 3 is dead now and the disks lived for 2-3 years with heavy emule use...

now i have a seagate 160gig 8mb cache 7200RPM, its very quiet. no more western digital for me thats for sure, now its seagate only...
Author:  ThEdEaDLiVe [ Sun Sep 26, 2004 6:39 pm ]
Post subject: 
Shit has anybody had any luck at all then with WD? Or am i going to be using my new one as a block to lift up my table leg within a year.
Author:  spudthedestroyer [ Sun Sep 26, 2004 10:13 pm ]
Post subject: 
yes, now that's something thats consistant about WD, the noise... to be honest, my WD is my loudest drive probably. The liquid junk in maxtors keeps drive noise down

ThEdEaDLiVe, No I don't think waiting is that good a policy on the expectation of huge difference for me to be honest. The reason for this is IDE is going out of fashion, and as the article states, WD and some of the other companies have abandoned 7200, and are just implementing SATA 10000rpm drives, which means the noise is going to be high.

The performance is very impressive for the Maxtor 10, perfectly acceptable for my solution. I will be getting more (only?) SATA later down the line, which opens the choice up a bit since thats where the market is going. But WD aren't 'doing' ATA133 atm, and are tending to be looking forward to huge performance drives like the raptor.

I think the comments about comparitive level drives being launched are in referance to the 16mb cache, rather than the specs in my first post, which that drive hits. WD will probably put out a high performance and capacity SATA based on the raptor, as well as a large 16mb cache ATA100, but I've kind of been put off with them.

Seagate I don't have much experience with, but not much is ever spoken about them, its always Maxtor, WD and sometimes IBM when they launch some new fangled beast.

Since I've had no problems with maxtor in the past, I think that's my best choice as it stands. Oh and the purchase is kind of urgent since I have little hdd space and have utilised my LAN to distribute DVD isos everywhere, that are awaiting processing. I need another pc, but I want this one to be huge capacity before dabbling in that. So since it meets my specs, and hopefully dabs will get them in stock damn soon, I think I'll take the plunge, since I'm predicting not much performance difference.
Author:  drpoopypantz [ Mon Sep 27, 2004 4:58 am ]
Post subject: 
I have a Maxtor 80 and a Maxtor 160.
They are both regular ATA (I don't think I have SATA capability on this Mobo) and they are both 7200 RPM.

I like em. I like Maxtor. Especially the new ones.

Speaking of new boxes...Even if I had the money right now I wouldn't buy a new box. I want a 64-bit chip, I want SATA capacity and PCI Express, I need a new Video Card to use the PCI Express, I need new Hard Drives to use the SATA, I need new RAM for the 64-bit chip, and I need a new case, because my current one sucks.

And if I buy a case that isn't beige, I'll need new CD-Burners. I need a new case anyway. My Power Supply eats poo.

And most of that stuff is still very expensive (Or entirely unavailable...Is PCI Express even out for AMD chips yet? I won't buy Intel), and I don't wanna spend more than $600 or so on a new box.

Plus I want a new Monitor, which by itself is gonna be $300 or so.

Stupid computer stuff. Why is Bleeding Edge so expensive?
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