Help me choose a Hardrive.
Hi all, I'm looking for a sata II hardrive with a capacity between 250gigs to 500. It's to replace my two 32gig wd raptors raid 0. I use them as my vista install drive. Eventually I plan to buy a 2nd to raid them later down the road.
I transfer a lot of video between drives to give you an idea of some of the more intensive transfers I do. Also I do a lot of file unzipping.
I hear 3 platters and 32meg cache is the way to go. However, they don't exactly advertise how many platters they have. Do you guys have any recommendations? I'd like to spend around 50 to 75 US.
I transfer a lot of video between drives to give you an idea of some of the more intensive transfers I do. Also I do a lot of file unzipping.
I hear 3 platters and 32meg cache is the way to go. However, they don't exactly advertise how many platters they have. Do you guys have any recommendations? I'd like to spend around 50 to 75 US.
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Edit: Oh, looks like Seagates warranty on retail drives has now dropped to three years. I'd still go Seagate without hesitation.
I have a Western Digital drive in my personal machine, but I have been doing builds lately with Seagate Drives, and honeslty, the Seagate drives seem to have a little extra zip, not night and day, but they just seem to have a little extra going for them, as inexpensive as it is to get a 7200 RPM SATA II drive with 32mb of cache now, you may as well.
Personaly, I can't wait for SSD to become a viable option. I think there are going to be some OS optimizations in the final Windows 7 release combined with improved price per GB that will make nice silent high performing SSD Raid arrays the standard, until then, buy yourself a Seagate drive, they are good performers.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=Property&Subcategory=14&Description=&Type=&N=2010150014&srchInDesc=&MinPrice=&MaxPrice=&PropertyCodeValue=359%3A15133&PropertyCodeValue=353%3A7886&PropertyCodeValue=353%3A13428&PropertyCodeValue=353%3A7797&PropertyCodeValue=353%3A7873
Googleing around I see plenty of problems too. Hrmm, tough call. I'd hate to end up with a brick.
If your more comfortable with the Western Digital brand, I would say nothing wrong with that.
To me, the Seagate drives I have installed do seem to have a tiny bit more zip, but are we talking a night and day difference over comperatble SATA II drives? Not really.
I have Western Digital drives in my personal machines, not so much because I felt that they were superior to Seagate or anything like that, the WD drives just happened to be on a good sale when I purchased them, and they are performing just fine.
Cliff, I'm like you. I'll buy Western Digital also, if a bargain pops up. In four desktops I'm running a mix of Seagates, WDs, and a Maxtor-branded Seagate.
I think i'm going to get 2 of this one^^ for RAID 1 for the OS of my home server, as my 250 WD just died several days ago.
Let us know what you think about the performance
If you put them in RAID just be sure they are the same firmware. If not just update the older version to the same. So many folks don't realize how big of an issue the firmware being the same for HD's in a RAID array is in real life. I am surprised at how many supposedly tech savvy people don't realize that you can upgrade the firmware of a HD.
ALSO:
For non RAID usage, a lot of people don't know that if you have random data loss or drive instability of a new HD a firmware update can cure the problem. Sometime HD manufacturers put out a bad firmware version that is loaded on a drive coming out of the factory. But this is usually fixable and I see many people dissing a HD that has had excellent reviews in the past.