Chosing HD - Need help

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Chosing HD - Need help

2006-10-19 23:00:14

I am going to buy a new HD. It will be 250-320 GB. My board accepts up to ATA 133.
Maxtors are rare thing and overpriced in my area - off.
Seagate - constantly hearing a lot of compatability problems with them during a very long time (>10 years) - off.
Samsung - - off?

So I come with two brands:

WD vs Hitachi. Any experience tales about them?

I tried googling but can't find any useful info. Any advise is apreciated.

P.S. Is there really no gain in ATA 133 vs ATA 100? Cache 8 MB vs 16 MB - any noticable gain?
Thanks.

Chosing HD - Need help

Reply #1 – 2006-10-20 00:22:54

Seagates are recommended the most by the industry professionals that I know.

-brendan

Chosing HD - Need help

Reply #2 – 2006-10-20 02:39:15

I had a some Maxtors and one WD HDD over the years (the Maxtors died pretty fast) and both brands seems to be so so.

I now have a Samsung SP2504C which is quite alright.

what I gathered from my own experience, the experiences made by friends and family and other reviews, I wouldn't recommend Maxtor or Western Digital.

Hitachi and Samsung are good brands when it comes to storage as far as I can see. I'm not so sure about Seagate but I didn't heard much negative from them.

in the end it comes down to your personal needs. there are several factors that would influence my decision on what to buy:
- reliability
- loudness
- speed
(- interface)

e.g. the WD HDD (80GB) was in use for six years and still runs with no errors. it's really loud though on write access which I personally take as a big minus.

in terms of performance, here is a comparison for a start:
http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html

Chosing HD - Need help

Reply #3 – 2006-10-20 06:23:34

With HDDs, it's a hit or miss usually. Either it is DOA / dies quickly or it lasts for years or even decades without error. I have bought about 6 WD HDDs so far and they all still work, minus one that my friend spilled something on. I have one seagate and it works still. I have not tried Hitachi yet so I cannot really compare.

Chosing HD - Need help

Reply #4 – 2006-10-20 06:33:44

Honestly, reliability recommendations from people are a joke. Everyone has had a bad experience with a given brand. It really doesn't make a difference, in my opinion (the only real exception being the IBM DeskStars and maybe Quantums, neither of which are still in business for the very reason of reliability issues). I know because I've owned every brand except Hitachi with no real problems.

I've never heard of compatibility problems with Seagate hard drives. I have no idea where that came from.

Noise is usually my #1 priority in choosing hard drives, and subsequently, I prefer Samsung hard drives which are generally the quietest. Silent PC Review recently found that the most recent versions of Western Digital Hard Drives are generally quiet as well (as compared to the competition). But if noise is not important to you, then I really wouldn't worry about picking which brand of hard drive to go with.

If you look at Digga's link, you'll see that most of the hard drives are clustered together with little statistical significance between most of them and worse, with such weak consistency that there's little reason to choose one among them above the rest and recommend it.

Chosing HD - Need help

Reply #5 – 2006-10-20 09:45:35

hmm, well my seagate 500gb + 16mb cache cost around £260, and it's served me superbly so far, but i dunno what your price range is.

Chosing HD - Need help

Reply #6 – 2006-10-20 13:34:37

Quote from: sthayashi on 2006-10-20 06:33:44

Honestly, reliability recommendations from people are a joke. Everyone has had a bad experience with a given brand. It really doesn't make a difference, in my opinion (the only real exception being the IBM DeskStars and maybe Quantums, neither of which are still in business for the very reason of reliability issues). I know because I've owned every brand except Hitachi with no real problems.

Not exactly true. IBM is obviously still in business (otherwise, why would I still be getting my paycheck?). And regarding IBM's drive business, it was sold to Hitachi, which continues to use and improve IBM's tech. I suspect IBM and Hitachi have addressed the engineering issues that caused the Deskstar episode by now...

As regards to purchasing consumer-level drives, the hardware tests done by Infrant for their ReadyNAS line led them to generally recommend Seagate. Plus, Seagate's 5-year warranty isn't something to be sneezed at.

I've read that Samsung drives are often easier to acquire at good prices in Europe.

-brendan

Chosing HD - Need help

Reply #7 – 2006-10-20 14:02:18

i never had a problem with seagates. very reliable drives. in my router i am running an old 12gb for 3 years now without any interruption.

before i switched to seagate i was using 4 samsung 160gb hdds. died. they have a good performance and are really, really silent but if you care about your data i would never use a samsung drive again. two friends of mine also have samsung drives that died. :-(

maxtors also seem to be reliable also but i don't have any personal experience with them

Chosing HD - Need help

Reply #8 – 2006-10-20 15:44:12

seagate and maxtor are essentially the company now, by the way.

Chosing HD - Need help

Reply #9 – 2006-10-20 16:11:33

Have had a smooth ride with WD so far. Although I dont like the fact that they represent 1gb as 1000mb. Do most companies do that? Buying a 160gb hard drive, formatting it and realising you have 149gb useable space isnt a moral booster.
Other hard drives which ive heard bad things about are the Samsung SpinPoint drives

Chosing HD - Need help

Reply #10 – 2006-10-20 18:16:34

I recommend a Samsung or Seagate drive, having bad experience with WD. Not that it crashed, but it's pretty loud and tends to get very hot quickly. For example, my old WDC WD2500JB used to reach 60 °C while copying 30 GB from one partition to another, while the same task ran on SAMSUNG SP2514N lead to a temperature of only 38 °C.

Chosing HD - Need help

Reply #11 – 2006-10-20 22:03:40

I only have experience with WD, Maxtor, Seagate, and Quantum. None of them ever failed, except for a very old Seagate back in my university.

My latest experience? Maxtors run hot, S & Q & WD runs cool. WD runs quietest, followed by Q, S & M ties as the loudest.

@TREX6662k6: Yes, ALL hard drive manufacturers use 1GB = 1'000'000'000 bytes; 1024 x 1024 x 1024 is technically called a GiB = GibiByte. For some reasons most software maker uses the outdated 1 GB = 1024^3 byte definition.

Chosing HD - Need help

Reply #12 – 2006-10-21 19:24:03

cant say about 3,5 version, bur certainly my lil 2.5 wd runs really really quiet and completly cold

- based on measuring the temp- of the case using my hand /the external case/, the Hitachies i have inside are pretty loud thought....

aida says:
( Storage:
Disk Drive HDS722516VLSA80 (160 GB, 7200 RPM, Serial-ATA/150)
Disk Drive HDS722516VLSA80 (160 GB, 7200 RPM, Serial-ATA/150)
Disk Drive HDT722516DLA380 )

and i agree with sthayashi basically.

Chosing HD - Need help

Reply #13 – 2006-11-03 16:58:22

and my xperience...
(+ HDDs of my friends & in my office)

Maxtor - neither fast, nor reliable - had 2 - both died after 1-3 years
WD - not bad, not expensive, sometimes noisy; but was very impressed with 10Krpm Raptor
Samsung - still own 2 of them, including 80Gb 0812N with 8Mb buffer - very, very good. Haven't seen anything faster in the class
Seagate - my favourite choice - quiet, reliable (have been using 2 of them for 4-2 years)
and
...Hitachi - former IBM Deskstar (very unreliable indeed it was :-), now not expensive, quiet, with the best performance among all HDD I know (lets see how long it will live though :-)

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