New Hard drive recommendation

Lord_Gardener

With all recent problems with hard drives has got me thinking about getting a new drive to replace my old 10GB maxtor master HDD! with new SATA? It would just be needed for progs 'cos I store all data on slave and copy to external Segate, so need not be too big! Any recommendations/best buys would be appreciated. Thanks

espresso

Lord_Gardener wrote: »

With all recent problems with hard drives has got me thinking about getting a new drive to replace my old 10GB maxtor master HDD! with new SATA? It would just be needed for progs 'cos I store all data on slave and copy to external Segate, so need not be too big! Any recommendations/best buys would be appreciated. Thanks

Unlikely that a motherboard currently fitted with 10GB drive would support SATA.

Lord_Gardener

Hi Expresso, It's an ASRock K7VT6 and does support SATA - a 4 year old home built system! I moved it's original 80GB Maxtor to work as a slave a couple of years ago for data storage and threw in the reliable 10GB drive from a 1999 home built system for running progs from.

espresso

Lord_Gardener wrote: »

Hi Expresso, It's an ASRock K7VT6 and does support SATA - a 4 year old home built system! I moved it's original 80GB Maxtor to work as a slave a couple of years ago for data storage and threw in the reliable 10GB drive from a 1999 home built system for running progs from.

Fine, there are plenty to choose from e.g. here Personally I stick with WD or Seagate.

Leopard

Lord G,

I usually buy my hard drives from DABS or from LambdaTek. They're both reputable, ship fast and their prices are rarely beaten.

You can get 4% off DABS prices by buying through Quidco and if you're not in a hurry it's often worth waiting until Friday evening because DABS frequently offers free shipping on orders placed at the weekend.

I usually buy Hitachi drives, when possible. Never had a problem with them. Maxtors and Seagates have been less reliable, for me. Haven't tried a Western Digital nor a Samsung.

I bought a Hitachi drive (albeit for a laptop) from LambdaTek mid-afternoon one day last week and it arrived the following morning. :money:

Only you can decide what capacity and spin speed best suits your needs and your funds, though. Golden rule is that you always use more disk space than you thought necessary when you bought it. :mad: So, buy big!

Good luck with whatever you choose.

isofa

I have WD, Maxtor, Seagate and Samsung (Spinpoints) in a variety of machines, none has ever failed. The only drive I ever had fail was an IBM Travelstar in a notebook.

Everyone will have an opinion and preference, but for everyone who has had a drive fail, a thousand others will have had good service. Decent HDs are much of a muchness, but there are some noticeable differences in performance.

www.scan.co.uk have good prices, but as with Dabs, if you want quality customer service (returns etc), look elsewhere.

Leopard

During a pleasant chat I had with a manager at PC World a couple of months ago when I was buying a laptop bag - he wasn't trying to sell me an alternative hard drive - he mentioned that the majority of hard drives that they get returned as faulty are Maxtor, followed by Seagate (which now owns Maxtor).

There was also a well-documented problem with Seagate laptop drives a year or two ago in which drive heads were breaking off their locating arms and ploughing into the disk platters, not only wrecking the drives but also making the data on it irrecoverable.

For these reasons I have been uneasy about buying Seagate or Maxtor drives recently.

There is still a 120 GB Deskstar (IBM, it was, then - not Hitachi) inside my 8 year old Apple G4 Cube and it's never missed a beat. My Cube was upgraded (to 1.2 GHz and a GeForce3) five years ago but it can only address a drive of up to 128 GB, so I've left it in.

I'm sure Isofa is right - he usually is, about most things - but I've never had a problem with an IBM/Hitachi drive myself, so I've stuck with them for personal preference.

We run four 500 GB (3.5" PATA) Hitachi drives in a 2002 Apple Power Mac G4 tower which is networked and runs 24/7 as a file and printer - plus Time Machine - server in our house! (And yes, since it's using a single power supply unit, we keep it regularly backed up!)

Marty_J

Leopard wrote: »

During a pleasant chat I had with a manager at PC World a couple of months ago when I was buying a laptop bag - he wasn't trying to sell me an alternative hard drive - he mentioned that the majority of hard drives that they get returned as faulty are Maxtor, followed by Seagate (which now owns Maxtor).

Perhaps most computers or eternal HDDs they sell have Maxtor and Seagate drives in them?

They're both very common brands.

Leopard

Marty_J wrote: »

Perhaps most computers or eternal HDDs they sell have Maxtor and Seagate drives in them?

They're both very common brands.

An ETERNAL hard drive! :j

Now that's what I want! In fact, I want half a dozen! :money:

Lord G, too, I expect.

Where can we buy them, Marty? :cool:

:rotfl:

Marty_J

lol....I guess we've both learnt that I need to put my glasses on!

Lord_Gardener

I sure do, if only :j. Just checking with AsRock that my mobo supports SATA II drives as well as SATA before making the decision.