Re: [LAU] Which SATA drive? Size? [Was: Re: partition table]

On 23 December 2010 at 19:21, Arnold Krille <arnold@email-addr-hidden> wrote:

> What matters is reliability. And when you ask 10 people about
> that, you will get 10 different opinions. As you ask for
> that, here is my experience: I had seagate disks fail, I have
> seagate disks running fine since 5 years. I have western
> digital disks work fine since years. I had an IBM disk fail
> after about two years. I have maxtor disks perform good since 5
> years. My hardware dealer recommended me samsung disks, but the
> first two I bought failed after about two years. Lets see how
> the rest of them (bought later) performs...

I've got to agree with that. I've had Quantum, Seagate, CDC,
Western Digital, Fujitsu and IBM, and many of each over the
years. Each of those brands, except for CDC has performed
flawlessly for 5-7 years. Also, each of those brands has died
within 1-2 years. The CDCs were a problem. But, I bought them
used and back when 600MB was a huge capacity. If you have a look
at the buyer comments at an on-line retail site, Newegg would be
one, then you'll see the new user comments will have rave reviews
for many months or even over a year solid, followed by reviews
about DOA drives and drives that fail too soon. This seems to
happen for all brands I buy, which seems to add credence to the
urban lore about disk drives that some batches of drives are fine
and then batches are bad. If you could figure out which batch is
good in advance of a purchase, then you'd be set.

As for quietness, my Seagate 7200RPM Barracuda (Ultra ATA 100,
up to 320GB) drives are very quiet. Also my Western Digital
Caviar (500GB and 1TB SATA) drives are very quiet. My Fujitsu
drives are very loud, even though they're 7200RPM. I pulled the
Fujitsu drives from my machines as they're even too loud for a
home office environment.

If you can find a retailer that will sell you drives with a "no
questions asked" return policy, then you can decide if they're
quiet enough. For my failing drives, Newegg was good about the
DOAs. Quantum and IBM exchanged my dead drives for reconditioned
units, even though those dead drives were way past their warranty
period. Seagate customer support helped me diagnose my drive's
problem with some of their software (yes, on Linux!) and then
exchanged that drive for a reconditioned unit. I have no
experience with the other vendors' customer service folks.

I hope that's useful info.

As was said earlier, good luck!

--
Kevin
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