Playing Catch Up, and IBM questions
Leonardo
Wake up and smell the glaciersEagle River, Alaska Icrontian
Guys, I've been in a desert wilderness (literally!) now for six months. I'm preparing to come home and do some computer upgrades. I've been researching as much as I can about new PC tech out there, but have some gaps in my knowledge. Need some hard drive questions answered.
At the 7200 RPM level, who's making the quietest drives?
What's IBM reliability these days? Are their drives still famous for early death?
How is the performance of Serial ATA drives compared to say, WD JB (8MB cache) series drives?
Fire away guys - I'm a sponge. I'll be moving away from sandstorms shortly, back to my family, back to my forum family, and back to computers.
LEO
At the 7200 RPM level, who's making the quietest drives?
What's IBM reliability these days? Are their drives still famous for early death?
How is the performance of Serial ATA drives compared to say, WD JB (8MB cache) series drives?
Fire away guys - I'm a sponge. I'll be moving away from sandstorms shortly, back to my family, back to my forum family, and back to computers.
LEO
0
Comments
Serial ATA is faster than PATA, but not by much. Performance is only slightly increased. I set up a serial ATA RAID 0 the other day with WD Raptor 10KRPM drives and it was getting 85K-87K ATTO's, which is pretty good.
Agree? Disagree?
SATA is set to be great, but at the moment the speed of the drives that companies are putting out at the moment doesn't really warrant forking out the extra bucks for them. WD's drives are pretty quiet and are still one of the best all round performers at least where ATA is concerned.
My advice would be to stick with a standard ATA drive, but make sure whatever mobos you get have SATA compatability in preperation for when SATA drives really start hitting the consumers spot.
Cheers
Another vote against IBM and Hitachi here.
NS
Secondly, ATM, there really isn't any benefit to serial ata YET besides the cables. You're right about the 8 meg 7200 drives. Best bang for the buck, IMHO.
Good Luck,
Flint
Secondly, I know you are interested in quiet And this post is more of an overview (Reprinted from: http://www.prosoundreview.com/showproduct.php?product=65 ) of my HD experience. So I hope it helps:
I own nine DiamondMax Plus drives (2)ATA66 (4)ATA100 (3)ATA 133 And (1) Original Quantum Fireball which was bought out and is now supported by Maxtor. They have all worked after incredible amounts of abuse. Not a single RMA! I've owned (2) Segates-died (1)Western Digital-died. And I stay away from IBM due to the horror stories of others and the evasiveness of their presales support people.
I find that the Maxtor Powermax diagnostic tools found on their website to be excellent in terms of testing/troubleshooting (which should not be needed in most cases). MaxBlast Plus utility (also available on their website) has a faster partition/format program than Microsoft fdisk. This is ideal for your C:\ drive unfortunately at the time of this writing there is no way to format the audio drives for 32k clusters so you must use the Microsoft FDISK.exe and FORMAT.EXE programs. I have alerted Maxtor to the need for this option and they have thanked me for the suggestion. We’ll see.
More on audio drive formatting:
http://www.prosoundreview.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=60
UPDATE:
Here's a response to my inquery. Let me say that Maxtor got back to me in less than 24 hours.
Merrick,
Our support staff can only make suggestions to the MaxBlast Development Team. The use of a 32K sized cluster is nice for those interested in performance over efficiency. However the draw-back that I usually see is that the use of 32K or 64K cluster sizes makes it so that the scandisk and defrag utilities do not function. This is most likely what the MaxBlast team discovered and therefor left it out of the program. The majority of end users stick with the default 16k cluster size. Regretfully you will have to resort to using the OS built-in formatting software for now until Microsoft can find a fix for the scandisk and defrag utilities in Win98.
My Reply:
Dear TSJoel61,
First let me say thanks for your quick response. Not only am I pleased with Maxtor's hardware [(9) DiamondMax plus and growing!], your excellent diagnostic and utilities but you guys are one of the fastest support responders in my experience.
Okay that said, let me respond to some things. I have never tried to make 64k clusters so I can't comment. However, I have been using a self built Digital Audio Workstation running original Windows98 for two years. True, my C:\ 15gig O/S program/ apps drive is running with 16k clusters but my D:\ 60gig+60gig Audio drive (RAID 0) has been running flawlessly with 32k clusters as have my E:\ 60gig and F:\ 60 gig backup drives. To date I have had no Scandisk or defrag problems. Yes the defragging of these drives does take a long time but high resolution 24bit/96KHz .wav files are huge. a 120MB .wav file is not unusual. Using the switch in pure dos at the A:\ prompt: Format X: /z:64 (where X is the letter of your audio hard drive) one can format without being locked into using the default format parameters in a typical windows install. This practice is quite well known among people in the digital audio and digital video industry. More here:
http://www.prosoundreview.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=60
I humbly ask that you might allow me to speak further with a member of the MaxBlast Plus Team. The prospect of having this advanced option in a Maxtor utility could only add more incentive to the Digital Media Workstation builder considering a hard drive brand. I for one will continue to endorse Maxtor as I have since ATA66 days based solely on my pure customer satisfaction.
Sincerely,
Merrick
Bellsong Recording Studio
UPDATE:
Merrick,
I understand your stance on the issue. I myself have a linux digital audio system and understand the use of large cluster sizes is preferable for such large file sizes. I will certainly pass your request to my supervisor for examination, but please understand that I am the "low man on the totem pole."
Thank you,
TSJoel61
My Resopnse:
TSJoel61,
Thanks for the quick response. I guess the MaxBlast Plus developers prefer not to correspond with customers? I'd like to hear from your supervisor on why or why not this can't be pursued. I presume that I might be able to fit the Microsoft fdisk/format.com file on the same disk with MaxBlast Plus:
"FAT32 supports drives up to 2 terabytes in size." & "All of the Microsoft bundled disk tools (Format, Fdisk, Defrag, and MS-DOS- based and Windows-based ScanDisk) have been revised to work with FAT32. In addition, Microsoft is working with leading device driver and disk tool manufacturers to support them in revising their products to support FAT32."-Microsoft
That is good to know. But Microsoft Format takes 10 times longer than MaxBlast
I'm currently working on a Win98SE DAW with a projected install of~20MB. My suggestion to Maxtor is just an acedemic exersise as the work around is not that bad. I can see where the 32k option would cause you guys headaches when people become confused by the option and start e-mailing and calling Maxtor support and the. If I were you I wouldn't do it but, making a single utility disk that is designed for large media workstations would attract the intrest of potential customers. Perhaps something like "MaxMedia Maker Utility" you could even offer it as a request first download. Just a thought.
Sincerely,
Merrick
Engineer/DAW Tech
Moderator
www.prosoundreview.com
Needless to say that though there may quieter drives, I choose reliability and that's in a recording studio!
By the way, I'm HOME now. No desert, no sandstorms, no 120*F afternoons. Back with my family! Yippeeeeee!
Leo
One thing that you might keep in mind with the Canterwood P4 you are planning to build; the southbridge on that chipset supports SATA natively and so it doesn't transfer data across the pci bus but uses it's own dedicated connection so putting a SATA drive or a PATA drive with a serillel adapter on the SATA bus would be a great place to put the new drive in the new boxen.
And only 1 driver per SATA cable so prolly only 2 HDDs will fit.
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduct.asp?DEPA=&submit=Go&description=N82E16822144318
Glad to see you back and safe and thank you for the sacrifices you made while serving our country.
Cheers!
Thanks for the advice; thanks also for your kind words. The attitude of friends, family, and the general populace is the most important factor for the success of the Armed Forces.
It appears I'll be having to cut a few corners on my two computer rebuilds. The wife - and I don't fault her at all, will not stomach an outlay of cash for top of the line components throughout, so I'll probably have to go with ATA rather than SATA for the primary drives. I'll probably just save a couple of my 2MB cache WD drives for the backups (Ghost drives), as speed for them won't be all that important.
Just a couple of thoughts here for your hard drive considerations. I don't have 8MB Caches on my drives but I can say that I did just upgrade to an OEM (generic seagate) SATA DRIVE. I'm not totally floored by the performance of this drive however a 120 GB version cost me only 74 bucks from Pricewatch (and from there it was Memorylabs.com btw) but since upgrading to a P4 2.4 GHz, running single channel DDR 266 @ 512 MB, my bench mark is oddly enough SETI @ Home. Previously I had a Celeron 1GHz with the same ram and it took 11 hours roughly to do a work unit... now it's like 3.5 or so hours. For the HD benchmark, I have been (perhaps incorrectly) using Nero 6.0's rating on drive speed and even with the crappy drives I bought, I got a 50% increase in speed with the cheapo SATA drive I bought. (I noticed that it actually had a translation chip on the mostly generic board attached to the unit)
My ATA drive I'm comparing it to: Maxtor 4W100H6 and the SATA Drive (again it's a Segate knock off) OEM120 72AS 12GB 7 SCSI DISK DEVICE or so it says.
Not sure if this helps much but there it is. I'm getting over 50 MB/Second while downloading SP4 (dialup), Running Seti@Home and with Norton AV Corporate running at the same time.
Yow
Dave
PS... Opps, sorry to the forum and to you... I didn't notice that my reply is months over due. Yow
Leo, in my experience, Maxtor's drives are the quietest. Admittedly, I haven't tried Seagate's, but my dad has had more Seagate drives fail than any other brand, and I haven't been impressed with their performance in the past, so I haven't got much motivation to try them.
The Maxtors are extremely quiet, and very, very fast. And I've got 14 of them, the oldest of which are going on 1.5 years, and I've had zero problems. I'd go with Diamond Max 9s.
//EDIT:
I was right. Covering your tracks. Tsk.