LITTLEBLACKDOG.COM

Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 5:31 am Post subject: Maxtor, WD, Hitachi, Seagate?

Ok, take make a long story short my WD 40gig died the other day and now I am in the market for a new hard drive and am in search of some dog recomendations. I was looking at the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB with the 16mb buffer. But now I'm hearing that the 16mb buffer doesn't hardly make any difference now. How can this be? I know that going from my 2mb to an 8mb buffer made a big difference. I am also hearing that Maxtor is not doing so well these days and making some faulty stuff.

So anyways now I'm looking at the Hitachi 250gb or a Seagate 250gb. The Seagate came in either just an internal drive or one with an external casing. Does anyone have any experience with these drives?

I think I'm going to stay away from WD unless a good deal comes along. I've been keeping an eye on slickdeals.net and some other misc. places. And I got info about all the drives from TigerDirect.

Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 5:36 am Post subject: Re: Maxtor, WD, Hitachi, Seagate?

TaiZhenMaximus wrote:
I think I'm going to stay away from WD unless a good deal comes along.

250GB Internal Serial ATA Hard Drive for $99 - No Rebates - at Best Buy Mr. Green

that's 2.52 Gigs per dollar

Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 5:39 am Post subject:

Sorry I forgot to mention that I am looking for EIDE drive info.

Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 8:57 am Post subject:

I've been really happy with the Seagate Cheetahs and Barracudas I've been running for the past few years. They are extremely quiet compared to the other IBM branded SCSI. Other than that drives are all about the same; get whichever drive suits your needs and budget.

On a side note, I urge you to consider a SATA & controller to drive it. It will make future upgrades easier.

Also, on your question about the buffer size, it might be that the memory past 8MB is simply far enough along the path of diminishing returns that the performance gain is negligible in certain circumstances. Your mileage may vary...

Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 10:51 am Post subject:

I didn't think about getting a SATA controller card. I just started looking and there's quite a few with large price differences. Anyone have any experience with these?

Not sure if it's worth it since my computer is a p4 1.8 and will prob. be replaced next year but I do plan on turning it into a server to replace my dual 700. The graphs I've looked at show a large increase in speed on these drives.

Thanks for the advice.

Leg Humper Joined: 16 Jan 2002 Posts: 5483

I would have to give my unbiased vote for Seagate drives. Just kidding, it is biased. My girlfriend works at Seagate. That really hot specimen of a woman is an electrical engineer.
I've had failures with Maxtor and WD drives it seems just as frequent as one another. Seagate bought Maxtor, but their product has not changed yet. All of our servers use Seagate, Hitachi, or IBM drives. They seem to be the best. (there are some duds out there though).

Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 11:32 am Post subject:

Anyone have opinions on Samsung SpinPoint series? Saw some good reviews on speed for these.

Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 11:54 am Post subject:

Thanks for the opinion Quijbe, and nice catch Very Happy

Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 11:56 am Post subject:

My little server's onboard controller failed a few months ago; I installed a Promise Technologies SATA II controller and a SATA Seagate drive and it works exactly as Promised (no pun intended). I just had to add a 3rd party host controller driver when installing Windows and no problems.

I can recommend the Promise controller; I think it was about $75.00.

Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 6:33 pm Post subject:

Just picked up 2 segate sata 400g hdd for my new computer. They come with a standard 5 year warrenty. They must realy belive in there hdd if they put that kind of warrenty on them.

Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 8:32 pm Post subject:

yeah... I like the 5yr stamp on seagates myself. as for SATA controllers... you can get good ones for under $20... but if you want ones that will take care of you for the long haul with good throughput... you'll probably be looking to spend around $50... check the listings at newegg to see good ballpark figures and reviews for popular cards.

as a side note... if they can get the silicon to last 5 years... most of the new fluid dynamic bearing (I think that's what they're called... trying to remember and I'm not 100% sure) motors tend to last well beyond 5 years so I don't think seagate is really going to be replacing many drives on base warrantees.

Leg Humper Joined: 01 Jun 2004 Posts: 4702 Location: Utah

I like Seagate - they kind of seem to be higher quality than Maxtor or WD drives (although maybe it's just my imagination). One thing that's for sure, Seagates are definately quieter than Maxtor drives.

Although - I've never had a drive fail (well, I had an 8GB Maxtor drive fail once - but it was like 12 years old).

Leg Humper Joined: 16 Jan 2002 Posts: 5483

Seagate is a cool ass company too. Metting the people my gf works with, and visting her building makes me want to work there. They also expect of themselves to be the best in their industry. My gf works in the R&D test lab, they reigourously test, redesign, and re-test new HDD models until they are the best they can be.

Posted: Wed Mar 29, 2006 9:03 am Post subject:

Good information to know. In the old days I didn't think to much of the company but it really sounds like they've turned around.

Stray Dog Joined: 09 Nov 2000 Posts: 58 Location: USA

This site http://www.storagereview.com/ has extensive, unbiased reviews of a wide range of drives (EIDE, SATA, SCSI, etc.). They've got a nifty queryable database for performance of all drives they've reviewed. No better site for that info IMHO. Razz

TaiZhenMaximus wrote:

Lycander wrote: