What to look for when buying a hard drive

Post by **ccb056** » April 30th, 2004, 2:32 am

When you are in the market for buying a new hard drives there are a few things that you should look for. Since the hard drive is the slowest component in your computer, you obviously want the fastest one that fits in your budget. Also, since you probably want to retain your data for a while, reliability is a key issue. You also have to find a drive that is compatible with your motherboard.

With the advent of Serial ATA (SATA) and the decline of ATA I would recomend getting a SATA Hard Drive if you motherboard supports it. The advantage of SATA hard drives is that not only do they have a faster bus speed compared to ATA hard drives, but they also have a faster motor to fill up that bus. SATA cables are also much smaller than standard ATA cables, this means that you can move them away easier to increase case air flow.

A not so recent event occured in the hard drive market. Most of the major manufaturers cycled out their 5 year warranty and replaced it with a 3 year one. Keep that in mind when buying a hard drive.

Here are a few generic generalizations of the different makes:
Western Digital: I recomend this drive, they are both reliable and fast
IBM: These drives are fast, but have heat problems and therefore unreliable
Maxtor: These look the best on paper but I do not recomend them because of their reliability (we received more maxtor's than any other defective hard drive)

Tebow2000 · Post by **Tebow2000** » April 30th, 2004, 2:55 am

Maxtor had the most defects..How so?

Post by **ccb056** » April 30th, 2004, 3:02 am

All I know is that we got more defective Maxtors than any other Hard Drive

I don't know why they are bad, I just know that they are bad

Cash · Post by **Cash** » May 31st, 2004, 4:21 am

At my work we have a whole bunch of broken WD Caviar drives that went out after about 5 years... otherwise i've never had problems with any other brands

Tebow2000 · Post by **Tebow2000** » May 31st, 2004, 3:36 pm

I have a seagate in my old dell 4200 deminsion desktop.. It is almost 5 years old now and I have not had a problem with it

Sumpin_Wong · Post by **Sumpin_Wong** » May 31st, 2004, 9:06 pm

I've read on other forums/reviews that Maxtor has the lowest rating for Customer Sevice in the HDD industry. I have a RL friend who has received 2 Maxtor 80g S-ATA drives from Newegg, and both were defective, so he decided to stick with IDE.

I have always used Western Digital HDD's and have never had any physical problems with the drive. I have been serioously concidering Hitachi drives.. any input there?

Tebow2000 · Post by **Tebow2000** » May 31st, 2004, 9:43 pm

I side with Westurn Digital.. My 120gig 7200RPM has never had a problem..

Post by **ccb056** » June 1st, 2004, 1:04 am

I don't know much about Hitachi, but if I were you I would use WD.

Tebow2000 · Post by **Tebow2000** » June 1st, 2004, 1:41 am

I havent heard good things about hitachi harddrives.. I hear that the often fail after a couple years of use

monte84 · Post by **monte84** » June 2nd, 2004, 3:00 pm

I have read alot of good about Seagate harddrives, i am thinking of trying them next time. The first harddrive newegg shipped to me DoA. It was a westerndigital WD1200JB it has gotten increasingly louder as time has gone on. Its really the luck of the draw with a HDD there are going to be bad HDD's no matter which manufactorer you choose, I personally haven't had a problem with a single Maxtor HDD (still have a working 1.5GB Maxtor from 1995).

With the advent of Serial ATA (SATA) and the decline of ATA I would recomend getting a SATA Hard Drive if you motherboard supports it. The advantage of SATA hard drives is that not only do they have a faster bus speed compared to ATA hard drives, but they also have a faster motor to fill up that bus.

Not all SATA harddrives have a faster motor, just WD's Raptor (or competitors equivalent, havent loked into them much as they are expensive and I dont have SATA support ATM) If you are still using 7200RPM HDD's on SATA then there will be almost no performance difference than if you were using PATA.[/quote]

Tebow2000 · Post by **Tebow2000** » September 21st, 2004, 1:49 am

My HD Setup
WD 120g 7200rpm 8mb cache Ultra ATA(Windows OS)
Maxtor 40gig 7200rpm 8mb cache Ultra ATA(Linux OS)

ellen_w · Post by **ellen_w** » September 27th, 2004, 8:29 am

do you have to use a certain kind of drive with osx on mac?

Tebow2000 · Post by **Tebow2000** » September 28th, 2004, 12:10 am

the format is different

macdawg · Post by **macdawg** » November 20th, 2004, 8:47 am

Seagate is the way to go.

smileymattj · Post by **smileymattj** » November 20th, 2004, 6:55 pm

yep seagate and WD, Quantim has a bad deal about a chip burning up, ive seen 6 differant quantiums with the same chip burnt.

Aggressor Prime · November 20th, 2004, 10:55 pm

Western Digital is top with their Raptors.

Tebow2000 · Post by **Tebow2000** » November 21st, 2004, 4:42 am

yeah, i need to get one of those suckers and replace my sucky 80gb seagate 7200

The_Man · Post by **The_Man** » November 22nd, 2004, 12:29 am

If you want super fast gaming you get Raid 0 with Maxtor's 15000 RPM HDD's