[wallijonn]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stephonovich a 200GB for $75?

Fry Electronics.

 

[zool]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stephonovich I'll give you that they're way overpriced, but man, they do give you a massive boost in gaming. A guy I know has 5 or 6 (he keeps getting more - was about that last I checked) gaming machines, all with P4 2.4-3.0GHz CPUs, 2GB RAM, and varying graphics card. He built one all out, with dual Raptors in RAID 0, and that thing loaded UT2K4 maps twice as fast as the others. It was insane. Worth it? No, but he had money to blow, and liked having toys.

Did they all have same type of RAM? I noticed my machine loaded games lot faster when i got dual channel PC4000 mems.

Ime, WD hdd's have a tendency to stop working.. Lots of people I know have had problems with WD and I myself have had a WD drive die on me.. I've had almost every brand available and the WD I had (long time ago) is the only drive thats given me trouble. I don't like the noise level either, I prefer Seagate or Maxtor.

 

[wallijonn]

Zool,

I think all drives will fail over enough time. They are usually warranted for 3 to 5 years. After 3 years you should start looking for a new drive, anyway. I've replaced every type of HD under the Sun when I was working with Compaq.

The new Raptors come with Fluid Bearings (like the Seagates) so they should run quieter and longer.

 

[SDA]

What wallijohn said is correct. It's really quite astonishing that magnetic hard drives last as long as they do, given the extreme levels of precision that modern hard drives operate at.

As for brands, hard drives from one manufacturer or another really aren't any less or more reliable overall. There's the occasional bad batch, of course, and on rare occasions a bad LINE (60GXP/75GXP, anyone?), but these aren't limited to a single manufacturer either. The only exception I can think of is that older Quantum drives tend to be extremely reliable (I have one here that's been running for something like nine years with no bad sectors, and most have had similar experiences), mainly due to that they were made for reliability rather than speed or capacity.

Anyway, SATA certainly has its problems right now, but then again so does pretty much everything just starting out. The best advice I can offer is to get a good SATA controller and keep the drivers for it on a floppy disk. If you don't want to do that, just go PATA until all the kinks are worked out.

 

[zool]

A hdd's lifetime has allot to do with how well it's being cooled. I would never put my hdd's in a chassis that didn't have at least 2x 80x80mm fans blowing at them. Keep them cool and they should work for a long time. Some brands are more sensitive to this then others.

I keep my cpu and gpu cooled by the means of water cooling, also I have a rather large passive cooler on my chipset, so there is no source of heat blowing around in my chassis. Still I think it is important to have fans blowing cool air on your harddrives to make them last longer and work better basically.. I plan on keeping mine for a long time.

 

[gloco]

Quote:

Originally Posted by zool I prefer Seagate or Maxtor.

lol, really? I work for a technologies department and the techs loathe maxtor's because they are buggy and are known for their failure rates. We also discussed how bad IBM hd's have become and to avoid them at all costs.

http://www.pcbuyersguide.com/hardwar...ty_report.html

Probably deals mostly with laptops.

I personally use Seagate presently and i can't really complain other than the sata issue which seems to have been ironed out.

 

[bg4533]

Quote:

Originally Posted by SDA There's the occasional bad batch, of course, and on rare occasions a bad LINE (60GXP/75GXP, anyone?), but these aren't limited to a single manufacturer either.

I had a RAID 0 array of 60GXPs a few years ago. 120GB of crap gone when a drive died. Other drive died a month after. I think 5 drives were replaced under warranty. I found they need very good cooling to stay alive. I have one left and it has lasted a few years idling around 30c. It isn't used for anything important though.

I have found that my drives do last much longer now that I consider cooling. I never exceeded max operating temps, but I guess they don't matter anyway.

Personally I am a Seagate fan. I have no complaints about my Raptors, but my experience with other WD drives has been a little less positive. In reality though I think it matters more about the drive than the manufacturer.

 

[zool]

Quote:

Originally Posted by gloco lol, really? I work for a technologies department and the techs loathe maxtor's because they are buggy and are known for their failure rates. We also discussed how bad IBM hd's have become and to avoid them at all costs. http://www.pcbuyersguide.com/hardwar...ty_report.html Probably deals mostly with laptops. I personally use Seagate presently and i can't really complain other than the sata issue which seems to have been ironed out.

Well, I have never had any problems with my Maxtor or IBM drives. I prefer Maxtor to IBM though because Maxtor is a bit quieter and the IBM's make weird noises some times.

EDIT: I know IBM have had like one bad series of harddrives that were defected from the beginning.. And their drives are sensitive to heat so they need to be well cooled. Never heard anything about Maxtor drives being bad in anyway. At least not their newer line of hdd's.

 

[Harrath]

My biggest gripe with SATA is the position of the connecters. On my motherboard, the main SATA (that run off of the southbridge, and thus are removed from the PCI bus) ports are located in between the AGP slot and the 1st PCI slot. Which means I can't use them with a video card in the AGP slot, especially not a fullsize one like my 6800GT. The repercussion of this is that my 90 nm A64 is running stock since the main hard drive is running off of the secondard SATA ports. Thanks, EPoX.

 

[zool]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Harrath My biggest gripe with SATA is the position of the connecters. On my motherboard, the main SATA (that run off of the southbridge, and thus are removed from the PCI bus) ports are located in between the AGP slot and the 1st PCI slot. Which means I can't use them with a video card in the AGP slot, especially not a fullsize one like my 6800GT. The repercussion of this is that my 90 nm A64 is running stock since the main hard drive is running off of the secondard SATA ports. Thanks, EPoX.

Haha!

... Ehem, Sorry man.. that sucks.

 

[wallijonn]

I've read that IBM sold their disk drive fab to Hitachi.

I've read that Hitachi drives run really hot.

I've read that the new WDs are of inferior quality. (Go on over to abxzone.com to read what some are saying).

I've read that the MSI Neo2 has the same problems with SATA connectors - that if you want to overclock you have to use the connectors between the video card & first PCI slot.

I don't do Promise controllers or SIS or Asus. That pretty much now leaves me as an Intel and DFI 875-T man.

 

[wallijonn]

And for those looking for PATA sales & bargains, this week:

CompUSA:
Maxtor 250GB HD, $99 after instant rebates.

CircuitCity:
W.D. 200GB HD, $89 after rebates ($149 - $30 -$30)

BestBuy:
Hitachi 250GB $99 after rebates ($179.99 - $40 - $40)

Fry Electronics:
WD 120GB $49 after rebate ($79.99 - $30)
Buffalo 160GB External USB2.0 $89 after rebate ($129.99 - $30 - $20)

You gotta love CompUSA's instant rebates.

 

[Stephonovich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by zool Did they all have same type of RAM? I noticed my machine loaded games lot faster when i got dual channel PC4000 mems. Ime, WD hdd's have a tendency to stop working.. Lots of people I know have had problems with WD and I myself have had a WD drive die on me.. I've had almost every brand available and the WD I had (long time ago) is the only drive thats given me trouble. I don't like the noise level either, I prefer Seagate or Maxtor.

I believe half were dual channel and half were single. He's probably upgraded all to dual by now. But regardless, he had a couple identical systems save for the Raptors, and it blew them all away.

As for WD's lifespan, I used them exclusively for years and never had a problem. I've switched over to Seagate for noise reasons (early ones especially were amazingly loud - got a 20GB in this box for Linux and swap that has a horrific whine), but I never had any WDs die. I think it's pretty much the luck of the draw, unless you're talking about things like IBM's Deathstars.

Quote:

Originally Posted by bg4533 I had a RAID 0 array of 60GXPs a few years ago. 120GB of crap gone when a drive died. Other drive died a month after. I think 5 drives were replaced under warranty. I found they need very good cooling to stay alive. I have one left and it has lasted a few years idling around 30c. It isn't used for anything important though. I have found that my drives do last much longer now that I consider cooling. I never exceeded max operating temps, but I guess they don't matter anyway.

Keeping data in a RAID 0 isn't a very good idea. Granted, the MBTF of modern drives (but then, you said this was a few years ago, when it was lower) is amazingly high, but you're still halving that every time you add a drive to a striped set. Keep your OS in RAID 0 if you want, and temp files, swap space, and the like, but not your data. At the very least, RAID 1.

I've never had a problem with drive cooling. Even with insanely crappy case ventilation (such that a stock XP 2000+ got up to 70C when idle... and ran fine, to boot. I've since modified the case, though), never had one die. /me knocks on wood.

walli, those are some crazy bargains, man. If things like that keep up, I might just go get a 120GB or so, buy an external exclosure, and put all my music and movies on it. No more hassling with fstab files and incompatible file systems. Of course, I've no idea what I'd do with my current 160GB drive, then... at most, I can fill up about 40GB with all games installed, once the music and whatnot is taken away.

 

[Eagle_Driver]

Actually, Maxtor's "SlimLine" series of hard drives - those made right after the merger with Quantum - have been notoriously unreliable. That series of lines - the D540X, D740X, and so forth up to DM9 - are some of the bad lines which Maxtor came up with. Also, that company's pre-DiamondMax series (the 7000 series) have not been particularly reliable, either.

Speaking of SATA, my first taste of SATA was with an AMD-based system with a Silicon Image SATA controller embedded on my NF2 mobo. I tried adapting one of my current drives, a WD 1200JB, to SATA via an adapter. It worked (as long as I loaded the drivers that were required of that controller) - but I subsequently reverted that drive to a PATA (IDE) connection. My current Intel-based system (with an Intel-branded, not just an Intel-chipset-equipped, motherboard), on the other hand, needed no drivers for SATA (SATA RAID is a different story -but I've never tried it).

 

[MichaelFranks]

37gb WD Raptor, no problems here with kernels 2.6 onward, been in heavy use for about 1.5 years.