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hard drives?

hard drives?

Postby EXTREMEoverclocker » Tue Jun 24, 2008 5:42 pm

just curious ... but i have been reading reviews on hard drives and for some reason seagates drives have been failing miserably lately ...
and i was plannin on getting one ...
buuuut
can anyone recommend a good hard drive ... 250GB or 300ish GB drive thats solid and has been known not to fail (as often as the other drives)

any ideas?
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Postby yeshuas » Tue Jun 24, 2008 6:02 pm

I have 5 or 6 computers currently, all which have at least 2 Seagate HD each. I only have one other HD in the house and it is a Maxtor, not sure which computer it is in at the moment LOL.
At any rate, I use Seagate exclusively, and there was only a brief time when I had several fail in a row probably from the same batch as it were.
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Postby Grav!ty » Tue Jun 24, 2008 6:05 pm

I only use Western Digital and have for years without any problems. I swear by them.

Generally I tend to go for smaller drives for operating systems and programs and use external ones for data storage. That's worked pretty well for me for a long time but many folk have their own ideas as to what the ideal drive setup is.

Whatever drive you end up going for, I think the cache size is important (many now have a 16 MB buffer), as are seek time and read and write times.
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Postby EXTREMEoverclocker » Tue Jun 24, 2008 6:18 pm

well i have been lookin at a lot of drives haha ...
i was hoping to get a 32MB cache if possible ... but storage space is not a huge concern as i reformat like every 6 months or so :) ... so i dont have time to take up all the space ...

any ideas or thoughts on the ones i have listed below... or a recommendation of your own?

i have been looking at:

1)Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3250310NS 250GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148309

2)Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148288

3)SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD321KJ 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822152054

4)Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD1601ABYS 160GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136200
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Postby ar1stotle » Wed Jun 25, 2008 9:02 am

I'd definitely stick with Western Digital. That's been the only brand I've used for a while. I've had Maxtors and Seagates die too quickly. Maybe it's something with the weather, but we got some 500gb Seagates for school and of 5 1 of them was 100% DOA, 2 seemed fine, and 2 make weird noised but haven't failed yet. I'd definitely stick with Western Digital. For an everyday use one, I'd go with the Caviar SEs. I think the REs are supposed to be for backup arrays, not everyday use. AFAIK WD doesn't have any 32mb cache drives (at least on Newegg) but I'd go for the reliability over whatever minimal advantages 32mb may offer.
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Postby yeshuas » Wed Jun 25, 2008 12:43 pm

I have been building and working on computers for over 20 years. I started out using WD, many years ago, and switched to Seagate, again years ago.

Seagate offers the best warranty, "5 years" on their drives, they are the largest harddrive supplier, and they didn't achieve that status without warrant.

I am not saying that WD is not a good drive, or that I would not use them if the warranty was equivalent to Seagate's, but why isn't it. Well it is if you want to pay extra for it.

I use 20 to 25 harddrives every week, and have only had one period where I had a few, I believe it was maybe 4 drives fail, and I attribute that in part to shipping, it was a batch that wasn't packed as well as they normally were.
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Postby EXTREMEoverclocker » Wed Jun 25, 2008 6:11 pm

lol im so confused :P
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Postby yeshuas » Wed Jun 25, 2008 6:32 pm

What it boils down to is your personal preference really, read reviews at like Tom's Hardware, or do a search on a particular drive and include the word reviews in the search.
Another thing is price per GB
If you are going for gaming, then RPM is a factor
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Postby Grav!ty » Wed Jun 25, 2008 6:34 pm

EXTREMEoverclocker wrote:4)Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD1601ABYS 160GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136200


Out of the choices you indicated, I'd go for two of these. It kinda spreads the risk of losing data.
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Postby ar1stotle » Wed Jun 25, 2008 7:16 pm

Here's a detailed comparison of the SE vs RE drives:

Question
What is the difference between Desktop edition and RAID (Enterprise) edition hard drives?

Answer
Western Digital manufactures desktop edition hard drives and RAID Edition hard drives. Each type of hard drive is designed to work specifically in either a desktop computer environment or on RAID controller.

If you install and use a desktop edition hard drive connected to a RAID controller, the drive may not work correctly. This is caused by the normal error recovery procedure that a desktop edition hard drive uses.

When an error is found on a desktop edition hard drive, the drive will enter into a deep recovery cycle to attempt to repair the error, recover the data from the problematic area, and then reallocate a dedicated area to replace the problematic area. This process can take up to 2 minutes depending on the severity of the issue. Most RAID controllers allow a very short amount of time for a hard drive to recover from an error. If a hard drive takes too long to complete this process, the drive will be dropped from the RAID array. Most RAID controllers allow from 7 to 15 seconds for error recovery before dropping a hard drive from an array. Western Digital does not recommend installing desktop edition hard drives in an enterprise environment (on a RAID controller).

Western Digital RAID edition hard drives have a feature called TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) which stops the hard drive from entering into a deep recovery cycle. The hard drive will only spend 7 seconds to attempt to recover. This means that the hard drive will not be dropped from a RAID array.

If you install a RAID edition hard drive in a desktop computer, the computer system may report more errors than a normal desktop hard drive (due to the TLER feature). Western Digital does not recommend installing RAID edition hard drives into a desktop computer environment.


That came from WD's FAQ. And as for the warranty stuff, the RE drives do have a 5 year warranty as opposed to the 3 on the SE16 drives. However, on their site they list a Caviar Black desktop performance drive (32mb cache) with a 5 year warranty. However, I don't see that it's on Newegg yet. I found it on Froogle but I dunno...
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