300 GB Diamondmax Hard drive £82.24 + P&P

wolfman

bleugh wrote:

for gods sake, don't use maxtor,
THEY'RE CRAP
use them in work and of around 3000 or so we use in a year within products, of the maxtors we get a 20-30% failiure rate within a year

I'm sure that's slightly over exaggerated. And a generalisation too. If you look through the Maxtor range it varies from model to model, so to write off the whole brand is a bit extreme.

The DiamondMax9's were very good in their time, the DiamondMax10's haven't quite lived up to their predecessor but are still good. Both are generally very reliable, I think the 9's were slightly problematic though. But then again type in any hard drive manufacturer and you're bound to get hundreds of bad experiences.

I'm not really up on the MaxLine range so can't really comment there.

bleugh wrote:

go for seagates, they're pretty good (1-2% failiure so far), but i've noticed they've moved production to china and changed the design a little recently, so have to keep an eye on that

I don't have a Hitachi drive but from what I've read they offer the best price/performance. They're meant to be reliable too. I think in terms of reliability though most manufacturers will have a 1-3% failure rate so whoever you go with there's a slight gamble.

tandeh

hitachi and IBM are the same, they are worse than maxtors, the dreaded deskstar,

biblejohn

tandeh wrote:

had 3 so far and all failed within a year

1 was replaced and the repalcemnt failed

Strangely enough i also have had a few maxtor drives fail. The most reliable ones ive found so far are ibm/hitachi. Ive 2 of their 180gb drives in my machine (which cost about £160quid each i hasten to add when i bought them years back!)

wolfman

tandeh wrote:

hitachi and IBM are the same, they are worse than maxtors, the dreaded deskstar,

Hitachi bought out IBM if I'm not mistaken, not quite the same. And anyway that was about 4 years ago, if not more! In an industry that changes every 6 months, I wouldn't look that far back.

And to be fair to the Deskstar I had (still have) the 75GXP and it's the only drive that hasn't failed out of a Quantum Fireball and Seagate Barricuda IV, and it's about 5 years old now.

Babbler

biblejohn wrote:

Strangely enough i also have had a few maxtor drives fail. The most reliable ones ive found so far are ibm/hitachi. Ive 2 of their 180gb drives in my machine (which cost about £160quid each i hasten to add when i bought them years back!)

Have only ever used Maxtor drives and, touch wood, nothing has gone wrong with them as yet over the last 4 years. Have got 4 of them in 2 different machines.

Guess its all down to luck sometimes...

RowaN

Size isnt everything. If you sleep in the same room as your PC, or have a HTPC you might be more interested in the quietest HD rather than the biggest. Heres a good comparison of the quietest HDs:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article29-page2.html

My last HD (8gb seagate) made a nasty whining high pitched noise, that I thought was actually coming from the PSU until I removed it. Now I've replaced this 3.5" drive with a 2.5" one (using a nifty little adaptor). The only sounds coming from my PC now are "easy on the ears" low pitched wooshy noises (the fans) which are easy to sleep through!

And whatever HD you have, dont forget this setting hidden away in winxp, to help quieten things down even more:

Properties > Screen Saver > Power > Turn of hard disks after: xx mins

But beware: I've been told that exessive spinup/spindown is what wears HDs out. So if you're constantly on your PC it doesnt make much sense to have a short spindown time.

Rave

I've not had a Maxtor die on me. The 80GB 740-something model in my brother's PC is nearly 3 years old now, and has been used 24/7 for most of that time. I have two Maxtors in my computers here and again no trouble (one I've only had for a few months but it was secondhand when I bought it).

OTOH I had a newish WD Caviar fail on me and my IBM deathstar finally died after about four years of use (I thought it did quite well considering).

bleugh

the stat is not a generalisation, we use the 160, 200 and 300 gig in PATA and SATA maxtors, and i can definatley prove at least 20% have failed, from calls, etc that arent logged, it's more like around 25-30%, well over 1 in 4 fail in a year

IBM's are pretty poor, the old Deskstar (Deathstar!) 75GXP range is why they got out of the HDD business.

of 50 of those we had installed over in singapore, about 20 of them failed within 1 year and 35 within two years. we've yanked 'em now and put laptop drives in there, no problems since