Which brand of hard drive do you prefer?

[Maxwell]

Does anyone have a strong hard drive preference? I used to buy only Seagate drives, but I recently had a Seagate drive die and I'm thinking about going with another company this time.

What do you guys think about Western Digital or Maxtor?

 

[graphic7]

I've always preferred Seagate Cheetahs (FC and SCSI variants) and the Hitachi SCSI disks. I've had zero problems out of them. I would stay away from the IBM Deskstars.

 

[MeJennifer]

The new kid on the block is Samsung, the 500GB version is very good performance and soundwise and is very well priced.

For a fast boot disk I recommend the 150GB WD Raptor.

 

[Astronuc]

My company and I at home use WD HDs, which seem do well, although I have one primary drive fail recently. I also have Maxtor at home and it seems fine.

Our policy is to have one main (primary) HD (40-80 GB) with OS/Apps and at least one other for data storage (at least 120 GB, but usually 200+ GB) so that the main drive is not constantly reading and writing. We also clone the main HD, so if it fails, we have a workable backup.

The datafiles are backed up to another HD (external or otherwise), and we do redundant backup.

 

[Kuno]

I have both Western Digital (100gig) and Seagate (120gig) and they've been running fine for over several years or so.

However, I still suggest backing up everything.

 

[BoredNL]

The Short Version: I've been building my own computers now for about 10 years and I've always stuck with Western Digital. They've always been reliable for me, but Seagate looks promising too.

The Long Version: I have a 20.5GB WD that's about 8 years old and still chugging, but I worry about it. Every now and then there is a mysterious click. I also have a 40GB WD, a 100GB WD, a 160 GB WD, and then I got a 200GB Seagate. Most of the computer builders I've known through the years strongly recommend WD. Some say Seagate is crap, others love seagate. I've had no problems whatsoever with my seagate and it's a lot more quiet than my WD drives, so I love it. I was having some problems with my 100gb WD drive, so I replaced it with a 160gb drive, but then it turned out that it was my motherboard going bad causing the errors. After replacing the motherboard and a format, the drive was fine. Oh, the 200gb Seagate is about 4 years old.

I've known a few people who bought cheaper IBM drives and they had problems. Samsung seems like a new contender, but from the reviews that I've seen, I'd stay far away. They seem to have a lot of problems. I'm sure you might find a diamond in the rough with certain models, so I suggest you go by reviews when buying a hard drive and only use brand name as a general indicator of quality. A certain model of a WD drive might have a lot of problems too, you know.

Well, good luck. :)

Phil

P.S. Oh, one more suggestion. If you want a more secure computer, I suggest you get two smaller, cheaper hard drives for your operating system and for some storage space for important files. Put it in a RAID 0 configuration, then get a larger hard drive for putting everything else on. This way if your hard drive goes bad, it's no big deal. If you don't want to spend extra money, I still recommend that you buy 2 hard drives rather than 1 super large one. It's quite a hit if a 500gb hard drive with everything on it goes bad you know.

 

[Thrice]

My 500gb WD came formatted with vfat & I only noticed once I had 200gb+ used up. So now I can't write files over 4gb until I buy another drive to temporarily transfer stuff. Probably for the best, though.

I've had it for ~4 months so I can't say anything about reliability. My 100gb portable maxtor seems to be going strong & I've had it for quite some time.

 

[BoredNL]

My 500gb WD came formatted with vfat & I only noticed once I had 200gb+ used up. So now I can't write files over 4gb until I buy another drive to temporarily transfer stuff. Probably for the best, though.

I've had it for ~4 months so I can't say anything about reliability. My 100gb portable maxtor seems to be going strong & I've had it for quite some time.

You could probably use a program, such as partition magic (there might be some free software out there though), to split the drive into two partitions, then you format the blank 2nd partition with NTFS, move the files from the first partition to the second, then format the first with NTFS, merge the partitions, and reinstall windows.

I would check to see if the WinXP could convert the file table to NTFS first though. I know it will for FAT32.

 

[ukmicky]

You could probably use a program, such as partition magic (there might be some free software out there though), to split the drive into two partitions, then you format the blank 2nd partition with NTFS, move the files from the first partition to the second, then format the first with NTFS, merge the partitions, and reinstall windows.

I would check to see if the WinXP could convert the file table to NTFS first though. I know it will for FAT32.

Most hard drive manufacturers will have free software on there websites allowing you to split hard drives etc

To convert a hard drive and its contents to NTFS format in xp i believe its quite simple ,though I've never done it.

(someone may need to check this ;)

In the run box type CMD

Then in the window which appears type. > convert d: /fs:ntfs

THE D IS THE DRIVE LETTER AND SO WILL NEED CHANGING DEPENDING ON WHICH DRIVE YOU WISH TO CONVERT.

 

[tszmuk]

HDD preferences

Does anyone have a strong hard drive preference? I used to buy only Seagate drives, but I recently had a Seagate drive die and I'm thinking about going with another company this time.

What do you guys think about Western Digital or Maxtor?

A am also a Seagate fan, but I think all hard drives are more or less the same. About your dead Seagate, well I had dead drives from about all the major manufacturers.

 

[Thrice]

You could probably use a program, such as partition magic (there might be some free software out there though), to split the drive into two partitions, then you format the blank 2nd partition with NTFS, move the files from the first partition to the second, then format the first with NTFS, merge the partitions, and reinstall windows.

Hmm I didn't even think of that. And I just use it for backups so I woudn't have to reinstall windows.

Is there a more linux-friendly filesystem? If I don't 'safely remove' the 100gb drive in windows, I keep having to boot back into windows and scan it otherwise it won't mount. Something about an unclean NTFS log file.

 

[Stevedye56]

I got a western digital because my friend requested it to me. It was supposed to be 160gb but came as 130gb. Needless to say I was pretty upset about that. Just to put this out there this was 130Gb BEFORE I formatted it and installed the operating system on it. I got a 120Gb Seagate about a year ago and it was only 117Gb when formatted. I took a dagger in the chest losing 30Gb of Hdd space. I d go with Seagate, I've never had a problem with them.