Hard Drive, Raid, SATA controllers. (Best Brand?)

fiewtoid

Weaksauce
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Jun 27, 2004
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Just a wild question. Is there a certain brand that performs better or are the all typically good??
 
With hard drives pretty much it is a wash on better, longer lasting or whatever. Personaly I like samsung and western digital. With raid though some westernal digital drives have issues with it so if you wanted raid buy the raid edition of the drive. Controllers I'll let someone elce answer. Thing is what are you doing or planning on doing. Recomendations for like a sata controller will very depending on if you want raid, how many drives, etc.
 
IMO Seagate drives are the most reliable. The raid card subject has been discussed about a million times, Highpoint will give you plenty of speed for a good price.

Tell us what you plan to do with it?
 
I've had best results with Seagate drives over the years.

However, have been using Hitachi 80g sata300 drives for 6 months or so and they seem to be running quite well. Recently installed 2 WD Raptor 150's in stripe config and they have excellent performance. I make image backups of this system quite often, of course.

Lots of opinions out there on raid controllers. Some users claim motherboard raid controllers are terrible; I've had pretty good luck with them, although only had to recover arrays once or twice.

Areca sata controllers are considered some of the best and most expensive. Promise and Adaptec are middle performance and price, with Highpoint and some others at lower prices, although Highpoint users have reported good results.

I use Areca 1120 & 1220, Promise SX4300 & EX8350, and Adaptec 1420SA. Also using a few mb controllers in either stripe or mirror configs. Primarily using Seagate for data storage in raid6 arrays on Areca and Promise cards.
 
I've had the best luck out of Seagate drives as well. Though all mine are of the SCSI variety.

I've had good luck with Western Digital and Maxtor as well.

For controllers, I recommend LSI, but for lower end use Highpoint, or Areca are both pretty good too.
 
fiewtoid said:
Just a wild question. Is there a certain brand that performs better or are the all typically good??

IMO, Performance-wise, all the 7200RPM consumer drives are pretty close. Even the 16MB cache models are not a lot faster than the 8MB models. I have found that the 10K Raptors are faster, but is it worth the price diff? Probably not.

To me the most important thing is the warranty. Seagate, with their 5-year warranty on all their models, is head and shoulders above the rest. 3 of my 4 system drives are from Seagate (The other is a Raptor, and those also carry a 5-year warranty, in fact I had to have it replaced after about 18 months, and they sent me a NEW one rather than a refurb, I was really pleased with WD for that).

thePP
 
HAHA I guess I didn't explain my question theroughly. Right now I have all my ide plugs taken up and I was looking into getting some HD controllers to throw in some more space. Right now I have two Western Digitals, and even though I wasn't asking the question of best hard drive I always kinda wondered HAHA so thanks. :D ClintE "Thank You" for the nice description of high, middle, and low end controllers. I wasn't really thinking about running raid even though though that should be a thought to look into. I am thinking about getting 400g-terabit. More of space. Right now I have a 160 and a 200 both ide (as stated before) and will probably move to sata for the new ones.

Thank you hardforum for as always being nice, awnsering my questions, and being so gosh darn helpful. :D

If any people have thoughts on some ideas for the more space as in Mid ranged controllers and some decenlty priced harddrives I would glad be a lazy fusk and soak up that information. But for right now I have to go to work (God I hate relife being so busy :( )
 
if price is no object, I have heard plenty of nice things about the Areca controllers. Otherwise, I heard that highpoint is doing pretty good this time around.
 
Highpoint is an excellent value! They even have a new Hardware XOR card!

Talk to unhappy, he has been testing an 8 port SATA card that seems to work well, ~$100.

Check out unhappy's LSR benchmark thread, has benchmarks of my Highpoint card and the unit unhappy has.
 
FWIW I've been running 8 250GB Western Digital Raid Edition SATA drives
and a High Point 2320 PCI-E raid card in a raid 5 together for 9 months now 24x7 without a single hiccup or error.
 
I've read some opinions on how to get max performance from the new Seagate perpendicular recording drives. Since the density per platter is higher, experimenting with different stripe and cluster sizes seems to make some difference in array speed. Don't know how much performance difference there is, though.
 
I have a 754 socket amd64 so the pci-e is out of the question. I want to upgrade but I would still put a controller card in here and turn this pc into a server. I just need to find some nice hds and a nice controller that are cheap.

HAHA
 
fiewtoid said:
I have a 754 socket amd64 so the pci-e is out of the question. I want to upgrade but I would still put a controller card in here and turn this pc into a server. I just need to find some nice hds and a nice controller that are cheap.

HAHA
If you don't have PCI-E then I'll assum you also don't have PCI-X.
What id your place?
 
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