what new hard drive should i get?

[Adi Head]

there is a point in life, where one must admit to himself, that he is out of disk space. after weeks of editing in denial, i have finally reached that point. i currently have two hard drives running: 40MB and 80MB, both 7200 WD. both are FULL.

i need another hard drive. either 120MB or 160MB. should i stick with WD?

tips, reccommendations, comments are welcome

[Jun Galinato]

I think you mean GB instead of MB. If you have good experience with Western Digital, then stick to it. I am using Maxtor hard drives and happy, so far no failure.

[Glenn Chan]

Low noise:

Samsung
Seagate
Hitachi are all good.

Maxtor, WD are louder.

Reliability:

There isn't much good information on this. Annecdotally, the brands seem to stack up as follows:

?#1- Hitachi
?#2- Seagate/WD

#3- Maxtor (the general consensus is that Maxtor is the least reliable from people who have seen lots of hard drives fail.)

Samsung is unknown.

Keep in mind that all brands have had disasters: IBM (bought out by Hitachi) had the deathstar line of drives (they might be getting class actioned over that), Seagate used to be pretty bad, WD didn't seem to have major disasters like IBM, and Maxtors have always been of less than average reliability.

Performance for video:

Look for the highest sustained transfer rates.
#1 seems to be Maxtor. I can't remember the rest. For DV, sustained transfer rates won't make too much of a difference since there's already more than enough.

Desktop performance (applications + OS drive):

8MB vs 2MB cache makes a 30% improvement on WD drives. Larger capacity also increases performance, but not near as much. SATA and PATA drives perform the same if the drives are the same model.

#1- Hitachi (this is according to storagereview.com, but they only tested the 250GB version)
#2- Western Digital
#3- Maxtor
#4- Seagate

I forget where Samsung stands, but it's #3/4.

Price:
Check hot deals sites like techbargains.com
A lot of the time you will see big box stores run loss leaders on hard drives. You will have to deal with limited quantities, impulse purchases while you are in store, and rebates however.

2- I recommend getting the larger hard drive, as you can always use the extra space for archival. Larger drives are a tad faster, more future-proof, and you are in trouble when you run out of drive space.

[Adi Head]

wow. Glen, thanks for the very informative reply. you helped me out. i think i'll stay with WD. they seem to be relatively reliable and in israel, they are cheaper than maxtor and seagate. also, i already have 2 WD drives running in my machine (a year and a half with no problems), so i might as well stick with the same brand as Jun suggested.

thanks!

[Adi Head]

i purchased a new WD 160GB, 2700RPM 8MB cache hard drive to add to my current 40GB and 80GB drives. now i realize that i can't hook up more than 2 internal drives in my computer, so i'll have to get some kind of external case or rack with USB connection. i'm not sure this is the best way to go. if you have any suggestions, please let me know.
thanks.

[David Kennett]

I just put two Samsung 160GB SATA drives in RAID 0 configuration. A local PC builder had been using a variety of brands over the years, and they were comparable. He recently went to Sammy and has far fewer problems than ever before. Three year warranty too!

His experience convinced me to try them. Good report on forums too!

[Jun Galinato]

Adi Head, I use 2 Maxtor 200GB and 120GB using a Hard drive Drawer bought from this company and I have no problem at all.
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=461808

[Rob Belics]

I want to say don't worry about brand names. I have eight computers in use here. Two are my first "bought" computers that are about five years old (Gateways) so I'm not including my wirewrapped computers from the 80s I built.

I have Samsung, Maxtor and WD hard drives. I have never, ever had a failed hard drive in any of them. I've had people bring me their computers that had a bad drive (two). I think I'm just smarter than the guy on the street in protecting my equipment but I really don't do much different than most people.

Half the time I'm fixing someone elses computer so mine winds up just laying in pieces scattered on a table so I can swap parts easier. No case. No shock absorbers. No 17 cooling fans.

I'm sure hard drives fail. It's just that I've never seen it.

[Jimmy McKenzie]

Keep gettin' the gigs ... you can never have too many. For my work, I use 2 removeable drawers per pc. when added to the os drive, this avails me to about 250 gigs for big projects. Once done, and it's time to load the next job, I simply drop in the next drive caddy(s) and continue working. The drives that are not in use are locked away and not continually powered up and spinning away. Total of 2 Tbytes in use. Maxtor and WD.

[Gints Klimanis]

Adi,

You can add more IDE devices with an add-in card. I use a High Point four IDE port RocketRAID ($90) card at home and a Promise two port card ($30) at work.

[Adi Head]

thank you for the posts.
in the mean time i installed my 160gb wd hard drive along with my 80gb drive. i formatted the new 160gb drive and durning the formatting process i noticed that my computer recognizes only about 130gb of free space. i know that normally, the actual available space is a bit less than what it says on the package, but a 30gb difference seems way too much. what could be wrong???

[Glenn Chan]

You need SP1 for winXP to see all of the drive's capacity.

Some old motherboards also may not see all of the drive's space. You may need a BIOS flash (small risk) or a new motherboard.

[Adi Head]

my motherboard is a rather new INTEL PEARL motherboard. i have sp1 installed.

it might be a bios issue. but what is a bios flash?

[Glenn Chan]

sorry, I meant you may need to flash your BIOS. Check in your motherboard's manual about that.

I doubt you need to do it, and there is a small chance the flash will go wrong and your motherboard will go dead. For example, if power is cut while your motherboard is being flashed then it will very likely be DOA. This will fix the 128GB limit (which can be some other number depending on how you count).

[Adi Head]

glenn, i goofed. it WAS infact a SP1 issue. i installed SP1 (which i thought i had been done automatically) and 30 more GB's were recognized on my new hard drive. thanks.