Advise on a high-capacity SATA hard drive

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Hello,

I am in the market for a high-capacity SATA hard drive. Can anyone
recommend a fast drive that is relatively quiet and is anywhere from
100 to 200 gigabytes in size?

Thanks,
Elery
 
Right now, Samsung and Seagate seem to have cornered the market on quiet
SATA drives, from 80GB to 160GB. If you need higher capacity than that,
perhaps a Maxtor or Western Digital SATA drive would fit the bill. If you
want the best performance, the 10,000 RPM 74GB Western Digital Raptor drive
can't be beat for SATA, but it doesn't fit your "high-capacity" requirement.

Hope this helps,
Russell
http://tastycomputers.com
 
I agree w/ Russell, from my experience, NOBODY but NOBODY beats Seagate for
absolute quiet operation. They are DEAD silent, you literally have to have
your ear right on the HD to hear anything, and even then it's difficult.

While others have varying degrees of silence (none are as noisy as the old
drives of just a few years ago), and I've had almost all of them at one time
(WD, Maxtor, Seagate, etc.), there's just no comparison, the Seagate wins
hands down for silence, they're PERFECT for a family room PC, upgrading a
TiVo, etc., where silence is king. Of course, the Seagate's rarely come in
first in the performance arena on various benchmarks, it's the price you pay
for silence. The problem w/ some other drives, particularly the WD's, is
they sometimes produce a very high-pitched whine, almost imperceptible, but
once you notice it, it tends to gnaw at you. If can vary in intensity from
unit to unit. I recenty got a WD 120GB, the whine was so bad, I just
couldn't stand it anymore, I dumped it on eBay only two days after buying
it! But the other 160GB and 200GB WDs on my system are fine, not as silent
as a Seagate, but darn close.

Unless you have a need for absolute top performance (e.g., a gamer), for my
money, the Seagate is my recommendation. If you need more speed, you might
consider purchasing TWO 100GB Seagate's and using SATA-based RAID-0
(striping). Or even smaller HDs, the striping "combines" the capacity of
both HD into a single, logical HD (e.g., 2 x 80GB in stripping = 160GB
total). You'll easily out-perform ANY single HD, regardless of
manufacturer, yet retain the silence of the Seagates (I'm hearing #s like
60MB/sec or more over SATA in RAID0, may require Raptors though). Even your
BEST single IDE HD will be lucky to achieve 27-28MB/sec, or if IDE RAID0,
perhaps 40-43MB/sec. IOW, if you can afford them, you could combine TWO WD
Raptors into a SATA RAID0 configuration and achieve 60MB/sec or better
performance, PLUS, you'd have 74GB x 2 = 148MB capacity, PLUS, 5 YR
warranty! Expensive, for sure, and not as silent as the Seagates, but a
VERY high-performance solution, you'd have to go to SCSI HDs to come close
to this level of performance (and they're VERY noisy).

HTH

Jim
 
The way to go is the Maxtor plus DiamondMax 9. Look at the data on
StorageRewiew.com . The line goes up to 200G.
JPS
 
Hello,

I am in the market for a high-capacity SATA hard drive. Can anyone
recommend a fast drive that is relatively quiet and is anywhere from
100 to 200 gigabytes in size?
Click to expand...

All the major manufacturers have 7200rpm 8MB cache drives in the size
which are about the same speed but Seagate is probably the quietest. If
speed is more important you could put a couple of WD Raptors together in
striped RAID configuration for a 148GB total but it won't be too quiet.
 
The way to go is the Maxtor plus DiamondMax 9. Look at the data on
StorageRewiew.com . The line goes up to 200G.
JPS
Click to expand...

Looks like you are right... at least according to this review:

http://reviews.designtechnica.com/review48_main238.html

Perfect for a Tivo configuration:

"In our Winbench99 tests the 6Y160M0 showed very fast sustained
transfer rates making this an excellent drive for audio and video
storage, where you need to maintain consistent substantial transfer
rates."
 
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