Current Sweet Spot for HDD's?

[AMD[H]unter]

Guys, I am in the market for a new hard drive and I need to know what the best bang for my buck is at the moment. Alos, what manufacturer is the best at the moment? Thanks!

edit: reading sticky to find out best manufaturer.....

[TType85]

Segate PATA 300GB for $89...

Got it from frys a week or so ago. If it's not on sale right now, it will be back...

[AMD[H]unter]

Well, I need one pretty quick, like tommorow. Anything going on right now? Oh, and that Fry's thing won't work, because it is a PATA, I need SATA, preferably SATA 3GB/s, too

[Dew]

Right now the best bang for the buck as well as good performance lays with the 300 or 320GB 16MB cache drives. Seagate is an excellent brand.

[xonik]

Not bad for Seagate's latest - 320 GB for ~$112:

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=202557401

[Cliff Couser]

300GB and 500GB for storage is the path I'm going. (SATA II)

[AreEss]

Seagate's not the best for quality, but they're packing a 5 year warranty on all drives. So unless it's absolutely necessary your drive never ever fails (HA HA HA!), there's no reason not to go Seagate.

Sweet spot's a bit harder to pin down. I actually am picking up 200, 250, and 300 at the same price right now. Differences either direction are pretty minimal too. If it wasn't for the fact that the 7200.9 80GB drives are so much faster in RAID1 I'd almost feel guilty not using 250's.

[NulloModo]

Seagate's not the best for quality, but they're packing a 5 year warranty on all drives. So unless it's absolutely necessary your drive never ever fails (HA HA HA!), there's no reason not to go Seagate.


Aside from enterprise market drives, who would you say is the best quality as far as reliability goes right now?

[drizzt81]

Right now the best bang for the buck as well as good performance lays with the 300 or 320GB 16MB cache drives.

Yes, the sweet spot is somewhere at the 300 GB level. WD3200KS is a nice drive I heard.

[n3g471v3 d3c1b3l]

I wouldn't buy anything smaller than a 250GB... well, unless i got a raptor...

[AreEss]

Aside from enterprise market drives, who would you say is the best quality as far as reliability goes right now?

Hitachi, hands down, followed by Fujitsu. Properly cooled, Hitachis go forever and a day, if not longer. The catch is compatibility with the T7K250s, but even then, they're amazingly solid drives which can take a pretty good amount of abuse. Seagate is pretty close behind, but they're more susceptible to mechanical failure than the Hitachis by a noticable amount.
Between the two, Seagate's 5 year warranty makes 'em worth it. Hitachi is only a 3 year. And it's not like Seagate's shipping crates full of DOAs like WDC likes to. So in the end, there really isn't enough of a difference to say X is better than Y. Both are likely to go 3 years plus - most Seagate failures are first 6-9 months - and at three years plus, may as well have it still under warranty.

[protias]

Hitachi, hands down, followed by Fujitsu. Properly cooled, Hitachis go forever and a day, if not longer. The catch is compatibility with the T7K250s, but even then, they're amazingly solid drives which can take a pretty good amount of abuse. Seagate is pretty close behind, but they're more susceptible to mechanical failure than the Hitachis by a noticable amount.
Between the two, Seagate's 5 year warranty makes 'em worth it. Hitachi is only a 3 year. And it's not like Seagate's shipping crates full of DOAs like WDC likes to. So in the end, there really isn't enough of a difference to say X is better than Y. Both are likely to go 3 years plus - most Seagate failures are first 6-9 months - and at three years plus, may as well have it still under warranty.

i still do not understand how so many people rag on WD drives. i own/owned 8 drives by WD and have yet to have a failure. and the rule of thumb for any hardware is if i lasts a month, it should have a long life.

[drizzt81]

i still do not understand how so many people rag on WD drives. i own/owned 8 drives by WD and have yet to have a failure.
your sample size is still too small to make any statement about the overall reliability. Even the SR reliability database is too small imho, but at least it has a couple of thousand drives all in all.

and the rule of thumb for any hardware is if i lasts a month, it should have a long life.
I would disagree with that. Most of my HDDs that failed did so either right away (DOA) or after ~1-2 years.

[viper650]

i have never had a WD harddrive fail from non user error. maxtors on the other hand, are complete garbage. every maxtor ive ever had has failed. wouldnt give you 10 bucks for a 500 gb maxtor.

[NulloModo]

Hitachi, hands down, followed by Fujitsu. Properly cooled, Hitachis go forever and a day, if not longer. The catch is compatibility with the T7K250s, but even then, they're amazingly solid drives which can take a pretty good amount of abuse. Seagate is pretty close behind, but they're more susceptible to mechanical failure than the Hitachis by a noticable amount.
Between the two, Seagate's 5 year warranty makes 'em worth it. Hitachi is only a 3 year. And it's not like Seagate's shipping crates full of DOAs like WDC likes to. So in the end, there really isn't enough of a difference to say X is better than Y. Both are likely to go 3 years plus - most Seagate failures are first 6-9 months - and at three years plus, may as well have it still under warranty.

Hmm, provided Hitachi offers some perpendicular drives when I am ready to buy, I will look into them too. I know it doesn't directly relate, but my HDTV is a Hitachi and I have been incredibly impressed by the build quality and performance (best in the market when it comes to CRT RP HDTVs).

The warranty would be good though as I am going to go with a RAID 5 array for media and data storage for my next build though, so data loss due to drive failure isn't really an issue.

Viper:

Then again, I have never had a Maxtor fail (knock on wood) nor any HD fail for that matter (knock on wood again). The Maxtor I have had running longest is a 2 gig drive running Win98 on a craptastic Via board with an equally craptastic PSU on a marginally craptastic K6-2 450 (old computer I donated to my mom who wanted something to use an old floppy disc version of MS word on).

[drizzt81]

i have never had a WD harddrive fail from non user error. maxtors on the other hand, are complete garbage. every maxtor ive ever had has failed. wouldnt give you 10 bucks for a 500 gb maxtor.
I have had a WD, Samsung and Maxtor drive fail on me. I have not owned many seagate drives - only one an early Cheetah.

[general]

The 300's are still the best bang for the buck. 500's would be, but they're still overly costly. Hopefully they'll start coming down to a realistic range soon.

[TrueChaos]

I picked up a seagate 320gb SATAII for about 130$ CAD, and im loving it. Havent seen much in the way of performance numbers for the 7200.10 series, so im hoping they end up being one of the top few, although ive never had problems with seagate before.

WD on the other hand... 14 / 16 drives ive had failed. NEVER again.

-Cameron

[sandmanx]

I've noticed you can never get any real objective answer on hard drives. When you ask someone, it's whatever brand they have had bad luck with is a piece of shit. I've had hard drives from all major brands die on me before, so I always consider it a crapshoot, and just buy whatever size and/or price I'm looking for, and backup my important data to something that has much less of a failure rate, usually DVD-R in recent times.

[drizzt81]

I've noticed you can never get any real objective answer on hard drives. When you ask someone, it's whatever brand they have had bad luck with is a piece of shit. I've had hard drives from all major brands die on me before, so I always consider it a crapshoot, and just buy whatever size and/or price I'm looking for, and backup my important data to something that has much less of a failure rate, usually DVD-R in recent times.
I completely agree. The problem is that most people think that their sample (usually <20 HDDs) is significant enough to make a suggestion about overall reliability. We all know that if WD produces 20,000,000 harddrives of a certain model, looking at 20 of them is certainly not going to cut it in order to make any suggestions about a long-term trend.


As I have been trying to mention a couple of times before in threads where people were looking for reliability adivce, there is a community effort over at SR (http://www.storagereview.com/map/lm.cgi/survey_login) trying to collect a large sample. The problem is that few people are willing to enter their data into the database. I am almost certain that even people asking for reliability data won't go through the trouble and enter their HDD info, which would help everybody out. It would be really nice if more people contributed to it (I have all my HDDs in there, ~20-25 of them).

[serbiaNem]

Hitachi, hands down, followed by Fujitsu. Properly cooled, Hitachis go forever and a day, if not longer. The catch is compatibility with the T7K250s, but even then, they're amazingly solid drives which can take a pretty good amount of abuse. Seagate is pretty close behind, but they're more susceptible to mechanical failure than the Hitachis by a noticable amount.
Between the two, Seagate's 5 year warranty makes 'em worth it. Hitachi is only a 3 year. And it's not like Seagate's shipping crates full of DOAs like WDC likes to. So in the end, there really isn't enough of a difference to say X is better than Y. Both are likely to go 3 years plus - most Seagate failures are first 6-9 months - and at three years plus, may as well have it still under warranty.

Just don't buy their 7200rpm 2.5" drives. My first 60gb died, and now my second one is giving me the click of death and corrupting some data, and can't finish an hdtach for its life. I have an 80gb 2.5" 4200rpm hitachi that has been running fine for 2.5yrs however.