A reliable hard drive.

[MikePL]

My HDD is about to fail. I know this from many years of experience. Odd errors appear, random restarts, and sometimes the drive stops for a second only to start again. So I am facing a drive crash as I'm writing this.

Do you have any recommendations concerning hard drives. I have been very happy with Seagate HDD's, but I am considering other options.

I need silent operation and reliability, NOT speed. Are 5400rpm drives still made? Anyway, I'll stop asking quesions, I would simply like to hear your recommendations. Size does not matter either. This is going to be my system drive, so whether it is 40, 80 or 200GB, I don't care.
Thanks in advance for your replies. I hope my drive will make it otherwise I won't read your replies :baldy:

[proberts]

My HDD is about to fail. I know this from many years of experience. Odd errors appear, random restarts, and sometimes the drive stops for a second only to start again. So I am facing a drive crash as I'm writing this.

Do you have any recommendations concerning hard drives. I have been very happy with Seagate HDD's, but I am considering other options.

I need silent operation and reliability, NOT speed. Are 5400rpm drives still made? Anyway, I'll stop asking quesions, I would simply like to hear your recommendations. Size does not matter either. This is going to be my system drive, so whether it is 40, 80 or 200GB, I don't care.
Thanks in advance for your replies. I hope my drive will make it otherwise I won't read your replies :baldy:

Seagate has a new single-platter drive that looks interesting (160G Barracuda 7200,) I tend to get Hitachi (nee' IBM) drives when I can, as I've had good luck with their IDE offerings.

The Samsung SpinPoint SP1614N with acoustic management turned on seems to get good reviews for silence and the last few Samsung OEM drives I've gotten are still spinning fine...

Paul

[Rockyw]

Hi Mike
I have been checking out hard drives for several weeks now. I had 2 go bad and I just ordered 3 for a new system. The Seagate's have a 5 year warranty but seem to be failing at a terrible rate. Go to newegg.com and check the buyer reviews. A Seagate rep told me they are shipped from China and Singapore and are getting beat up so bad they can not survive the trip. Many new users are having DOA drives or failures soon after start up. That leaves Western Digital, Hitachi or Samsung. Of these I ordered Western Digital. They have a 3 year (watch out, some have only 1 year) warranty's. Some have 5 year but they are only for a RAID setup. The newest WDs have a model number ending with SK. They have 16mb buffers and are SATA drives, if you have an older mainboard you might need IDE100 drives. The WDs with IDE 100 have 8mb buffers end with JB. Stay with a 7200RPM drive and as large a buffer as you can get. Some run raid, I do not as I do not want to trust my data to a raid setup. Hope this helps, email if you have other questions. Good Luck

[Igor]

I have two Maxtors and one Seagate for almost 2 years , both brands work fine (so far)

[Bill C]

.....snip.... I do not as I do not want to trust my data to a raid setup. .....
Sounds like you've had a bad experience with Raid. For systems requiring high availability and data protection, I'd only consider Raid. Of course, Raid setups can get very complex, however, Raid 1 (mirroring) is fairly straight-forward (albeit more expensive as you are basically doubling the amount of disk required). And, whether or not one uses Raid, you still have to have a good backup process and follow it.
I've used LaCie external hard drives (USB) as well as Maxtor, and while I don't use Raid, I do run a program daily which copies (incremental backup) from my primary drive to the secondary. Monthly I archive pictures to DVD.
Bill

[Rockyw]

I did leave out a few very good drives. LaCie, IBM and some like the Maxtor's. I read a lot of reviews on places like ( http://www.tomshardware.com/), and (http://www.anandtech.com/) for reviews and information. I was ready to order Seagate's when I started seeing all the bad reviews. Western Digital and all the others have problems as well so it's a matter of choosing what you consider the lesser of evils in a way. I have considered going to a RAID 5 setup. Three or more drives with redundant data in case of a drive failure. If one goes bad, the data is also stored on one of the other drives. For now I'm staying with a single drive setup. I also have heard anything but RAID 0 is not much faster than a single drive, is that true? It seems everything with computers is a flip of a coin, heads it starts in the morning, tails we cuss out Bill Gates and run ghost so we can work. Thank goodness it's heads today, have a good one.