recommended drives?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tim Chandler
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Tim Chandler

I'm interested to see opinions on reliable harddrives (or manufacturers)

I'm looking for an IDE drive in the range of 200 - 320 GB. Reliability is
more important to me than other aspects of performance.

After looking at reviews at Newegg (and also storagereview.com/) I feel a
little concerned. Pretty much every drive has about 5 - 10% of customers
disappointed because the drive was DOA or failed within a few months.

Thanks for any comments.
 
Tim said:
I'm interested to see opinions on reliable harddrives (or manufacturers)

I'm looking for an IDE drive in the range of 200 - 320 GB. Reliability is
more important to me than other aspects of performance.

After looking at reviews at Newegg (and also storagereview.com/) I feel a
little concerned. Pretty much every drive has about 5 - 10% of customers
disappointed because the drive was DOA or failed within a few months.

Thanks for any comments.
Click to expand...
I suspect a lot of those are comments from folks who abused the
drives, either by dropping them, by not following static precautions,
by using them in machines with poor power supplies, or by allowing
the drives to overheat. I've bought quite a few drives from a variety
of manufacturers over the years, and I've never had a DOA or infant
mortality. (Now I've probably jinxed that record -- see what you made
me do?)

That said, I like Seagate drives. They seem to give me the fewest
"issues." I've also had very good results with Maxtor.

The biggest problem(s) I ever had -- IBM (but those didn't fail
early, just suddenly). I won't touch an Hitachi as a result --
maybe in a few years that'll change and I'll try one of their drives.
In the meantime, there are plenty of other makers of drives, so I
see no compelling reason to take a chance. Once burned, twice shy,
and all that.
 
Tim Chandler said:
I'm interested to see opinions on reliable
harddrives (or manufacturers)
Click to expand...
I'm looking for an IDE drive in the range of 200 - 320 GB.
Reliability is more important to me than other aspects of performance.
Click to expand...
After looking at reviews at Newegg (and also storagereview.com/)
I feel a little concerned. Pretty much every drive has about 5 - 10%
of customers disappointed because the drive was DOA or failed
within a few months.
Click to expand...

Trouble with those is that there is no way to decide how many
of them are stupids that have dropped the drive or dont monitor
the drive temp and ensure it stays within reasonable limits.

I personally avoid Maxtor and WD. Both appear to have more
than average failure rates and Maxtor is a complete pain in the
arse to make a warranty claim with in my country.

I use Samsungs, mainly because they are so quiet. I havent
had any failures myself, but a mate of mine has had one
failure in a system which has also killed another drive.

Seagates have a better warranty but they are too noisy and get to hot for
me. I prefer to run with nothing but the power supply and cpu fans and make
sure both a very quiet, thats why I dont bother with Seagates myself.
 
samsungs - again for the quietness and good write ups
worthe running the samsung utility from their website
first to do a quick check + turn the acoustic mode to quiet

seagate - read somewhere they lost their "quiet" crown due to some patent
thing
 
Previously Tim Chandler said:
I'm interested to see opinions on reliable harddrives (or manufacturers)
Click to expand...
I'm looking for an IDE drive in the range of 200 - 320 GB. Reliability is
more important to me than other aspects of performance.
Click to expand...
After looking at reviews at Newegg (and also storagereview.com/) I feel a
little concerned. Pretty much every drive has about 5 - 10% of customers
disappointed because the drive was DOA or failed within a few months.
Click to expand...

I would stay away from WD (seem unreliable) and Maxtor (pretty
reliable if cooled well, but get hot if not cooled well and then
fail often). I also still begrudge IBM/Hitachi the lying to their
customers, although their drives seem o.k. these daus.

Seagate looks good, Samsung also looks good and from my observations
Samsung is more quiet than Seagate and stays cooler.

Still, HDDs are mechanical products with a short product cycle,
i.e. you get nothing that has been tested and optimised for a long
time and any manufacturer may misstep. This also means you cannot
get a install-and-forget reliability level device.

Final advice:

Get not a single drive, but a pair of Samsungs and run them as RAID1.

Whether you do or no not follow that advice, enable SMART on the
disks and run a complete surface scan (long SMART self test) at
least one a month. Make sure the disk stays cool under load, and
by cool I mean < 40C. With that you should get early warning for
many possible problems and if you are lucky several years of reliable
operation.

Arno
 
There's always customer abuse due to ignorance, dyslexic instruction
reading, too hurried to pay attention, and downright laziness. Lot of
things can cause a HD return in the instance noted.

Have been using a WD 200GB JB, NTFS formatted for weekly image storage of 3
OSes and some logical drives. Month's worth stored always. I do trust it
for that purpose. Can't say it would stand up to daily beatups by XP if
installed there. A WD 80GB JB does that. Believe I got the 200GB from
mwave.com
 
Thank you all for your comments, and thanks in advance for any further
responses!
 
Previously zjustice said:
samsungs - again for the quietness and good write ups
worthe running the samsung utility from their website
first to do a quick check + turn the acoustic mode to quiet
Click to expand...
seagate - read somewhere they lost their "quiet" crown due to some patent
thing
Click to expand...

True. The brokane US patent system allows patens on obvious
things like tuning the noise/performance ratio on a drive
by the user. Seagate refused to pay and had to remoce acoustic
management. Why this affetcs the whole world is beyond me.
Should stupid laws and legal paractices not be confined to
their county of origin?

Arno
 
Jim said:
There's always customer abuse due to ignorance, dyslexic instruction
reading, too hurried to pay attention, and downright laziness. Lot of
things can cause a HD return in the instance noted.

Have been using a WD 200GB JB, NTFS formatted for weekly image storage of 3
OSes and some logical drives. Month's worth stored always. I do trust it
for that purpose. Can't say it would stand up to daily beatups by XP if
installed there. A WD 80GB JB does that. Believe I got the 200GB from
mwave.com
Click to expand...

FWIW, I haven't had reliability problems with WD drives, but they seem
to have a weirdness factor that sometimes gets in the way -- stuff like
needing to be jumpered differently depending on whether there's another
drive on the line, which makes their use in removable carriers more
difficult than it otherwise might be. And some (particularly
non-Windows) drivers seem to have trouble with them. So I stay away
from them.
 
Tim Chandler said:
I'm interested to see opinions on reliable harddrives (or manufacturers)

I'm looking for an IDE drive in the range of 200 - 320 GB. Reliability is
more important to me than other aspects of performance.

After looking at reviews at Newegg (and also storagereview.com/) I feel a
little concerned. Pretty much every drive has about 5 - 10% of customers
disappointed because the drive was DOA or failed within a few months.

Thanks for any comments.
Click to expand...

So the purpose of this question is?
 
CJT said:
FWIW, I haven't had reliability problems with WD drives, but they seem
to have a weirdness factor that sometimes gets in the way -- stuff like
needing to be jumpered differently depending on whether there's another
drive on the line, which makes their use in removable carriers more
difficult than it otherwise might be. And some (particularly
non-Windows) drivers seem to have trouble with them. So I stay away
from them.
Click to expand...

The jumper required for master alone, and yet another for master with slave
have been on WD ide drives since I can remember. They all have a jumper for
cable select for carrier mounted drives like the rest of the mfrs. Or stick
with slave for all conditions if you don't like that. I only use one
carrier, WD drive in it is jumpered master/alone, and there's no more room
in my tower for more drives either.

I've used two different varieties of Linux, don't see what you're referring
to about "non-windows"..
 
So the purpose of this question is?

Just wanted to get some feeling for how people feel about different drives
and manufacturers, the same way reading reviews at Newegg and
storagereview.com gives some feeling, or talking to various friends.

I appreciate the time people took to respond, and it has been helpful to me
in deciding what drive to buy!
 
What is SMART anyway? I recently had an error message from SMART during
my initial boot. I don't remember the exact words, but it basically
said that my drive was going to fail soon and suggested immediate
replacement.

Is SMART just another type of dsik check utility (like scan disk)?
Also, is my drive really BO? I haven't had an error message for about a
month. I am planning on replacing the drive with another one, but could
I use the "SMART says it's bad" drive for storage or will it cause
problems in the long run?

Arno Wagner wrote:
 
kinetic said:
What is SMART anyway?
Click to expand...

Its basically an attempt to identify a drive that is
likely to die, before it actually does die, so you can
copy off the important data before it actually dies.

Obviously some faults cant be predicted, but some certainly can.
I recently had an error message from SMART during
my initial boot. I don't remember the exact words, but
it basically said that my drive was going to fail soon
and suggested immediate replacement.
Click to expand...

Yep, that's basically what it says.
Is SMART just another type of dsik check utility (like scan disk)?
Click to expand...

No, its much more than just another scan disk. The drive keeps
track of all undesirable activity, like new bad sectors showing
up, and the drive spinning up too slowly etc. It keeps that data
forever, and warns about imminent failure if say the number
of bad sectors gets above a specified level.
Also, is my drive really BO?
Click to expand...

Usually the warning is accurate. Post the SMART data
report using Everest, its usually obvious from that more
detailled report what the problem with the drive is.
http://www.lavalys.com/products/overview.php?pid=1&lang=en
I haven't had an error message for about a month.
I am planning on replacing the drive with another
one, but could I use the "SMART says it's bad" drive
for storage or will it cause problems in the long run?
Click to expand...

Normally not a good idea. If the SMART data
indicates that the drive is dying, it usually will die.
 
Tim said:
I'm interested to see opinions on reliable harddrives (or manufacturers)

I'm looking for an IDE drive in the range of 200 - 320 GB. Reliability is
more important to me than other aspects of performance.

After looking at reviews at Newegg (and also storagereview.com/) I feel a
little concerned. Pretty much every drive has about 5 - 10% of customers
disappointed because the drive was DOA or failed within a few months.

Thanks for any comments.
Click to expand...

I've gone down the Western Digital and Maxtor path and gotten burned. I
hate their 1 year warranty. All drives will fail at some point, so the
warranty period definitely matters!

Seagate has a 5 yr warranty, so I exclusively buy from them.
 
No Spam said:
I've gone down the Western Digital and Maxtor path and gotten burned. I
hate their 1 year warranty. All drives will fail at some point, so the
warranty period definitely matters!

Seagate has a 5 yr warranty, so I exclusively buy from them.
Click to expand...

Just bought a 200GB ATA Seagate retail kit from Fry's electronics for
$99.99 - $50 rebate = $49.99. Replacing a WD and a Maxtor which are
defective and out of warranty but are less than 5 years old. You can't
hardly beat Seagate's warranty, especially at $0.25 per gig.
 
WaterWatcher said:
Just bought a 200GB ATA Seagate retail kit from Fry's electronics for
$99.99 - $50 rebate = $49.99. Replacing a WD and a Maxtor which are
defective and out of warranty but are less than 5 years old. You
can't hardly beat Seagate's warranty, especially at $0.25 per gig.
Click to expand...

Its distinctly arguable if the extra 2 years is worth much tho.
 
kinetic said:
What is SMART anyway? I recently had an error message from SMART during
my initial boot. I don't remember the exact words, but it basically
said that my drive was going to fail soon and suggested immediate
replacement.

Is SMART just another type of dsik check utility (like scan disk)?
Also, is my drive really BO? I haven't had an error message for about a
month. I am planning on replacing the drive with another one, but could
I use the "SMART says it's bad" drive for storage or will it cause
problems in the long run?
Click to expand...

Modern disks have spare sectors and map bad ones to spares automatically.
This means that you never see a bad sector until the disk is in really bad
shape, so it seems to fail without warning.

SMART is intended to deal with this by providing you a warning when the disk
is starting to show signs of impending failure--it is built into the disk
and monitors a bunch of indicators, including the percentage of the spare
sectors that have been used--when it tells you that a disk is on the way
out, it's not a guarantee of impending failure--the disk may run in its
current condition for a very long time--but you were warned.

That message is actually from your computer's firmware--SMART doesn't say
"this drive is about to go", it just reports a bunch of numbers that if you
have turned on the capability get checked during the POST routine and if
the combination is such that your computer manufacturer's programmers have
decided that they indicate that the disk is having problems the machine
will give you the error message you see. If it came up once and not again
it's probably a fluke--something went wrong during power up that one time.
If it's happening most times that you power up then I'd replace the drive
at my earliest convenience. If you haven't shut the machine down and
rebooted since you saw it you should and see if it comes up again--if it
does, assume that the disk is about to go.
 
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