CynicX

I'm looking for a reliable hard drive with large capacity. I currently have 1 80 gig Western Digital. Well its running low on space an I was looking into a another drive. I used to have a 20 gig but it died a while back.

I was looking into a 250g Western Digital but after reading the reviews there seems to be alot of failed drives (now I know people are more prone to complain rather then say how good the drive is and how beautifully its been working).

Anyway my question is: What manufactor of hard drive do you guys recommend?

Other question: What kinda of drive do I need? When I bought the 80 gig I thought it was just IDE and thats all. After searching newegg.com I see IDE ultra ATA100 or IDE Ultra ATA133. Which do I want? I'm putting this into a 4-5 year old Dell Pentium4 2ghz. I got on the Dell page and ran the service tag an came up with this "5828D ASSEMBLY, CABLE, ATA66, 2DROP, KLINGER" .

Thanks guys.

ldivinag

IMO, finding one that last forever is next to impossible.

backup, backup backup...

my dell machine recently died. i was able to retrieve about 50% of my data. nothing mission critical. just crap i built up over the years.

buy one with the longest warranty and tape up a folded copy of the receipt on the drive.

then buy another drive to mirror this on an external chassis.

Churnd

Western Digitals are still pretty good. I have a 160 gig Maxtor that I scored for $40 after rebates.

My preference:
1. Western Digital
2. Maxtor
3. Hitachi
4. Seagate
5. Everything else

Maxtor and Hitachi are neck and neck though. I believe that only Maxtor drives come in the ATA133 flavor, where as everything else IDE is ATA100. Don't worry about that, because it's mainly a bandwidth thing. Just make sure you get a good bang for your buck.

A few things to look at:
-Seek times: lower is better (around 8ms, I think).
-Buffer size (or cache): higher is better (some WD's have a 16mb buffer, which is great).
-RPM speed. 7200 is as good as it's gonna get with IDE. A good buffer (cache) can make up for that.

No drive is gonna be perfect. Every manufacturer is gonna have its bad eggs. Maximum PC did a hard drive test a month ago, where Maxtor shipped them 2 consecutive bad drives. When they finally got one that worked, it kicked ass. But due to the previous bad drives, they scored it low. Kinda ignorant, IMO, but it just goes to show. Like Leo said, backup your stuff!! An external drive is good, because it's not spinning or on as much. Removable media such as DVDs are better because they're written to then removed and stored. Protect your investments.

alanh

I'm trying to get my act together enough to do it consistently, but I bought two external disks with USB interfaces. I bought mine when Fry's was having rebate offers.

I don't have a huge drive on my PC, so mine are 250G. Anyway, the plan is make a backup with one, then take it "off site" and start using the other one and repeat that process. Then you have backup in case there is a real disaster like your house burning down or equipment stolen. There is still some exposure until you get your new data onto a drive thats stored remotely, but its better than doing nothing. Exposure time depends on how rapidly you swap drives.

With all the stuff that exists in digital form only, it seems prudent to do something like that.

snap-on

Ive had good luck with maxtor.

I have some old segate scsi drives that are damn near 10 years old and still spinnin away

alpha

My preferences:

1. Seagate
2. Western Digital

I haven't had much luck with Maxtor, nor have a lot of my friends..

I have a 320gig Western Digital on my desktop that i built about a month ago, it has done well so far. My roommate has a seagate thats been in his comp for about 3 years, and its done very well. I was going to go with Seagate for my new desktop, but I scored the WD for a great deal.

But like everyone said, backing up data is the most important. Hard drives can crash anytime. I had an external hard drive crash one month after I bought it.

dibble9012

I agree with seagate, they are really great drives, reliable and extremely quiet. I have heard both good and bad about hitachi

89macrunner

ive always had good luck with western digital maxtor never used a seagate or hitachi except for the one in my ibook.

anyways...screw parallel ata....get a serial controller card and a SATA drive..the speed diffrence is nice..and you get get 10k rpm drives

Churnd

That's a really good idea. Those cards also make setting up RAID painless, so you could get a second drive and stripe them in RAID 1, which is basically the second drive performing a real time backup of the first. Also called mirroring.