Which IDE HD?

I'm looking to buy a new HD - the one I'm looking at is a 250GB Maxtor Diamondmax 7200RPM, 16MB cache, for £54.

I currently have an 80GB Maxtor Diamondmax and never had any problems with it, other than it eventually being too small.

Should I be looking towards other brands? I don't want to go above around £50 and it must be at least 200GB.

Check these chunky munkys out.

..Uh page 4 on this list is where you want..prices are good as well as choice.


http://www.microdirect.co.uk/productlister.aspx?GroupID=195

There's a lot of decent drives... Western Digital, Maxtor, Seagate, Samsung, etc.

One good indicator is warranty lenght -- some manufacturers offer a 5 year warranty on some of their models, versus the 3 year warranty typical on most drives today. Be a little wary of drives with a warranty less than 3 years.

Personally I like the samsung drives I have. They are fairly cheap, and much quieter than the other drives I've owned over the years. Only an 8MB buffer though, they tend to be a little slower than some of the competition -- so it does depend on what's most important to you. Reliability? Size? Speed? Cost? Noise?

The one brand I won't touch with a ten-foor pole is IBM/Hitatchi, after the whole Deathstar^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HDeskstar debacle. Those drives has such insane failure rates they are almost legendary. A warranty replacement is no good if the replaced drives dies within months too, as does its replacement, as does its... after all.

I had a 80GB Hitachi in a modded XBOX console. It died. Makes a clicking noise -- I hit it with a hammer next.

Yes. Maxtor drives run way too hot. Get an IBM/Hitachi.

It's hardly IBMs fault that people don't RTFM. When a drive is specificly designed for no more than 8 hours continual service, you should probably not put it in a computer that is permanently switched on.

IBM didn't exactly go out of their way to mention that little tidbit until *after* all hell broke lose...

I always buy WD drives now whether IDE or SATA they run cool and quiet and have great performance.

Gfk-

DO NOT GET A MAXTOR.

They used to be good but they don't last 5 minutes these days. Western Digital or Seagate I believe are decent. WD Caviar's are pretty damn reliable in my experience.

My maxtor's cache chips died a month or so back. It wrote random crap all over the drive.. :(

The drive was no longer than a year old.

I currently have two Maxtor drives - both been faultless for over 2 years. I'm only getting a new one because 40+80GB isn't really enough for me any more.

Opted for a 200GB Western Digital Caviar, 7200RPM, 8mb cache - £48.

I had a maxtor go bad too. Mine are hot enough to fry eggs on I reckon.

Anyway, best setup these day swould be a 10,000rpm smaller capacity for the OS and a big fat slower HD (400GB) for all the data.

I tend to use Samsung (currently using a lot of 250gb), not the fastest but certainly very very quiet.

I've found them pretty reliable, as I've not had a failure with any of the drives so far (I've used 80gb up, and even had one as a replacement in my Sky+ box). Main 'test' for me is the 4 x 250's currently run continually in my backup server (8 months continual up time at the mo).

I've had fails on Maxtor and IBM before now.

200GB Seagate here, wasn't the cheapest (Hitachi was... funnily) but 3 year RTB.

My last 3 HDs have been Seagates (120GB/ year+ old, another 120GB/ 2+ years old and one I can't remeber how old it is...) no problems what so ever. Before that I used to buy Maxtors, no problems either. If I had to buy one today, I'd buy Seagate.

Actually I just bought a pair of Samsungs for my sisters new PC. Glad to hear they're okay as I was kinda worried.

I just got a samsung 250GB drive after using WD for a while. I was shocked at how quiet the new drive was. Never occured to me that the almost headache inducing whine was my old HD till I swapped it out.

The samsung halved the noise level and is VERY fast. I love it. The old 100GB is in an external USB2 3.5" HD enclosure. so when I want it I can plug it in, but the samsung really improved my computing experience and would recommend you consider the noise as much as the price, capacity and performance.

It's quite a bit faster than my 2 year old and 4 year old WD drives too.

Don't get Maxtor
Don't get Maxtor
Don't get Maxtor
Don't get Maxtor

They're always the ones that catch your eye in magazine ads/web-shops for GB-per-buck, but I've had too many of them die within 1-2 years, and my brother's had the same.

The Samsung SP****N drives (mine's a SP1203N) are usually decently priced, pretty fast and very quiet too. Mine's lasted for ages.

I was happy with IBM for years. Now i would go with Hitachi.

Soon you'll be starting one of those "My HDD Died" threads ;)

I don't think and hope so. :O)

I've heard that others had problems with IBM but i never had any with them since a lot of years. Also not when i was an administrator.

*sigh*

over the last two days my computer restarted once and froze solid (including the mouse) for a few seconds last night.

I hope to GOD its not yet another dying drive- if so, you guys must be starting to think i'm making it up. I assure you, I'm not...

Funnily enough, my PC took three attempts to start up this morning. Don't know if it was something to do with the temperature because it was freezing in here (1C/34F).

people don't realise that cold can cause a low read-head signal. Still, Strange :O

Mine totally froze though... the kind where it beeps if you try to move or click anything and the pointer is stuck.

Lol havn't had that since Windows 95. For me it was a memory module that wasnt seated properly. Dunno how it got like that, might have been knocked?

My old western dig 120GB drive is starting to die... problems starting up, clicking and spinning down. I've been getting the same thing as you Cygnus, freezing completely so went for a hitachi 320 GB with 8 meg cache.

Oh man, got it a few days ago, installed it and it spun up and continually clicked (once every 1/3 second), so it's effing unusable. Now I'm in the horrible situation of having to resolve this with the supplier and after reading through this thread don't feel comfortable getting a new one dispatched in case it does the same. Can I ask them to swap it if I complain enough?

My drive is no older than 2 months and if it's faulty i'll be getting a free replacment by law...

My next will be a Western digital RAID edition 2 drive. They are rated for continuous heavy use and have a long warranty.

The Maxtor I've got right now is rated for RAID use but only for low loads. It doesn't quite get 24/7 use but there are some weeks where it doesn't get switched off.

If I wanted a drive for a small PC, it would be a Spinpoint. They are lovely and quiet.

Just one heads up: Those 'raid' drives are not recommended if you don't actually run them in RAID mode. In addition to the being designed for heavy use, they have one additional 'feature' -- they spend very little time on trying to recover drive errors.

All harddrives have a bunch of spare sectors on them, and when errors crop up (not 'if', but 'when'), the drive will automatically detect this and remap the affected sector to a spare. This can take a couple of seconds. Depending on the severity of the problem, the drive may spend up to 20 seconds or so repairing the damage. However, in a RAID system, such a long delay can cause the array to break and requires it to be rebuild which can take hours... so the 'RAID'-rated harddrives have different firmware that pretty much order the drive never to spend more than 2 or 3 seconds trying to repair itself, to prevent the array from breaking. the RAID adapter itself will then deal with the damage on its own and reconstruct the data on the fly when requested, rather than the drive working around the problem and actually fixing the real problem.

That's nice, but if you don't intend to run in RAID mode, then you really do want your drive to take a couple of extra seconds to save your data for you.

So... While the RAID drives tend to be pretty good quality drives, the fact that their firmware allow for less damage control in case of minor errors it not a good thing for non-RAID users... Those ought to stick with the regular non-raid drives.

(My next drive(s) will probably be a pair of the Samsung 400GB's)

xlsior: I did wonder about that. I guess I'll be going for 2x500GB in a RAID1 array or 3x400GB in a RAID5.

The upgrade after that will probably be to go solid-state.


*EDIT* BTW, how ridiculously cheap are hard drives these days?! over 3GB per £ for the top models. Crazy. I remember an 80MB drive cost me £120 at one point.

Every brand of hard drive dies. They all do. If they don't for you, there's someone else for whom that brand dies every other week.

It's irrelevant really. Maxtor, Western Digital, IBM, etc. Buy whatever is on sale. :)

I went for a Western Digital simply because it has a slightly lower operating temperature than the Maxtor.

Noise doesn't really come into it. I have half a dozen or so fans in my PC so its noisy anyway.

Yup. It's not a matter whether they die, but when.

Luckily in most cases a harddrive's economical life is over long before the physical one. (Meaning in most cases you will upgrade your drive and/or computer before the drive grinds to a halt)

Why that "when" usually seems to be when you haven't made a back up for 3 weeks, I don't know, but hey.

I'd consider myself 'on the ball' if I made backups every 3 weeks. Three months is nearer the mark.

I did some data recovery this weekend on a Maxtor Diamondmax 8. Funny, the drive died from overheating and smashed the hell out of its head. Unrecoverable.

Even more funny: This is the model of drive that died on me not so long ago- couple of months I recon. For me it constantly overheated and then one day, the cache died.

Speaking of back ups, I'll pass along a link I found one day:

www.mozy.com

Backs up the directories you tell it to every hour or so. Backs up, encrypted, to an internet server and it's completely invisible to you. I love it.