So my hard drive just crashed, it was a 120GB Samsung SATA drive. I’m pretty sure that it’s the drive itself, but I have yet to test it in another computer…
Well right now I’m posting this from my computer running off of my old 1.6 gb Fujitsu hard drive (I got 304MB of free space as soon as my installation finished; 195 mb after some drivers were installed, no time to get linux working right now so I just put XP on it).
My HD is out of warranty (I think it was only a year…) and I need to get a new one. So my question is: What is the best price/performance/reliabilty/warranty HD out there (I guess you could say what is the “best” hard drive out there)?
I was looking at a 74gb Raptor, but is it worth $150 for 74 gb? Is the performance really that great? If it is, then by all means I’ll go for it. $150 is probably a bit more than I’d like to spend, so don’t reccomend anything over that).
By the way, I generally don’t use much disk space, so ~80 gb is probably fine.
I’d say that unless you really need a massive amount of speed the Raptor represents pretty poor value for money and you could get ahold of a much bigger drive for the same price.
The last couple of drives I’ve used were Seagate Barracudas, and I’ve been very happy with them. The original drive is over 2 years old and hasn’t exhibited any problems, and also runs fairly quiet.
i’ve never seen a drive with less than a 3 year warentee.
the seagates have never failed me.
i’ve had 4 of them over the years. got a 120 and a 200 in right now. GF has a 60 laptop one, i have an old 4Gb one that is still working.
No.
For $142, you can get a WD Caviar 320gig.
You can get an 80gig Hitachi for $50. (from directron.)
I trust hitachi, I have a 400gig made by them, very quiet, also cheap.
Hmmm, I better take a look at this then. I seem to remember it having a one-year warranty but I could be wrong. Better check (I’ll have to find the model number).
Are the Western Digital Caviar drives good? I was looking at that 320 gb…
My computer came with a Seagate and it crashed on me within 2 months. I now have a Samsung internal and a Maxtor external. Both are quite quiet and seem to be reliable so far.
Hard drives are all temperamental and can fail at any time. A little knock here or a voltage or temperature fluctuation there. It’s hard to recommend a make. What you should check are the features on each model you look at such as fluid-dynamic bearings (I think they all come with those these days but it’s an example), spindle speed, average seek times etc.
have you ever worked on a computer with a scsi hard disk? wanna feel like your machine just had a spare 512mb of ram thrown into it, without buying ram?
Look, you can get the 36 gig raptor for around a hundred bucks. buy it. you’ll thank me later.
I had been running a 36 gig raptor for about 3 years now, and when i first installed it… wow. it makes a marked improvement, no doubt.
the thing is, that i had a large disk drive in my old machine (120gig wd), but could never get my home computer to perform as snappy and quick as my work computer. even with a gig of ram in my home machine (compared to 512 in my work computer).
it was because my work machine was sporting a nice fast 10k rpm scsi drive. Now granted, the scsi pipe is fatter than sata150, but still, what a nice improvement over my old disk.
use the 36gig for your operating system and program files only, then pick up an 80gig for now to store your data on. the two disks come to about $150 bucks on newegg right now, and you will definitely feel the performance boost.
plus you get the added bonus of two seperate disks. this will also speed up your access times a little. (program/swap file reads off the raptor, while data is read off the other disk).
don’t take my word for it, go read some reviews (there is something like 481 glowing reviews of the raptor on newegg). i know i was very, very happy with the results when i switched, and probably couldnt go back to a 7200rpm disk (it would feel like working on a laptop all the time).
It shows the Raptor 36GB and 74GB, and the 74GB is faster than the 36GB. Is this performance too small to notice, or is it worth getting the 74GB model? I am guessing this difference is due to the 74GB’s 4.5 seek time compared to 5.2?
You’ll notice the 36GB model trails in almost all benchmarks.
I really don’t need that much storage space now, so I’m thinking of getting the 74GB instead of a 36+80. Maybe later I’ll add an additional hard drive for more storage. I only used a little over forty gigabytes on my previous system (the Samsung HD).
However if the performance gap is too small to notice I think I’ll stick with pld’s suggestion.
stick the hard drive in a zippy plastic bag, bung it in the freezer for 4 hours or so, let it thaw out and plug it back in - that sould give you enough time to back everything off from your hard drive.
Trust me, it works, sometimes perminatly* sometimes momentarily, others… just never
As far as HDDs go, Buy the super fast SCSI style HDDs. Use them for the OS/main programs, and if you have low RAM, use it as a scratch disk… depending on your system/requirements, several smallers ones set up in a raid etc, will be more benificaial… and use large, cheep one to archive/deep storage data…
*hard disks do not last forever, but it can protentially fix the problem till a new on arises, but not many people are willing to risk a second hard drive failure and replace it after backing up.
I just got a seagate 160gig drive. It was cheap, but comparing it with a lot of the other brands out there, I’ve had quite a few of them, and they seem to last quite a while(how about a 13 year old HD that still works), plus a 5 year warranty doesnt hurt the deal at all. Too bad i had to downgrade from my old 10k data drive. Oh well I still have a quick boot drive, who cares about data?
Hard drives are like a gentle flower, give them the right conditions, and they’ll be with you forever, give them bad conditions, and they’re gonna die. That being said, get hard drive coolers, They are reasonably priced nowdays, and you’ll extend the life of your drive, a lot.
About 4 months ago I got a 40GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 as an update to my computer, for about £25. It’s incredibly quiet and works very quickly.
You’ll probably want a higher capacity disk than that, probably with another interface, but Maxtor seems to be a very good quality, value-for money choice.
Maxtor quality is terrifically bad. Every single maxtor drive I’ve had has crapped out after a year or so.
I’ve been getting Western Digitals since and I’ve had two 40 gig WDs for about 4 years and a 120gig SATA for a few months now and they work flawlessly.
Its my understanding that SCSI is faster due to the fact that (in most cases) the controller’s chip handles all of the I/O processing for data flowing over its bus, whereas IDE/ATA solutions rely on the CPU to process these commands. Slow/bogged CPU = slow ATA performance.
My experience is the same as pld’s: work system (with Ultra320’s) would smoke any of my home (ATA-133’s) any day on I/O stuff. Wouldn’t have it any other way on my work systems - and if I could afford it at home, I’d go that route there, as well. (Also, definitely get dual HDDs as he recommended - but get both SCSI if you can afford it.)
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