What Hard Drive ?!

[Copper]

Hello again.

I am looking at upgrading my hard drive but am a little bewildered on what to buy, i was thinking on one the following three, there is only about £10 in difference with price, so it was just case of which one

Wester Digital Caviar Special Edition 80GB hard drive
Speed: 7200
Interface: Ultra ATA/100
Average Read Seek Time: 8.9 ms
Buffer Size: 8 MB

Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9 80GB Hard Drive
Speed: 7200
Ultra ATA/133 Data Transfer Speed
Fast ATA/Enhanced IDE Compatible
8MB Cache Buffer
100% Fluid Dynamic Bearing Motors

Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9 80GB Hard Drive
Speed: 7200
Ultra ATA/133 Data Transfer Speed
Fast ATA/Enhanced IDE Compatible
2MB Cache Buffer
100% Fluid Dynamic Bearing Motors

Is there a great difference in the 2mb & the 8mb, are we speaking 0.00001 of a second, or is the difference noticeable!
Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Copper.

 

[Lostman]

Wester Digital. I've heard sooooo many bad things about Maxtor.

 

[tech4hire]

Also, check warranty. I beleive western digital JB special edition drives are still coming with the 3 year warranties. i have 2 of the 120gbs and both had the three year warranty. Maxtors only have the 1yr warranty now. But even if they both had the same warranty i would take WD any day over Maxtor. Do i mean that WD drives dont go bad, no. I have had several go bad. But that is because i only buy WD. But i deal with about 100 bad HDDs at work amonth and the biggest percentage is Maxtor that goes bad. Even with the bad WD drives ive had the warranty process is as painless as possible. Maxtor is not near as easy to deal with. Good luck.

 

[Ken Masters]

I would go with...

Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9 80GB Hard Drive
Speed: 7200
Ultra ATA/133 Data Transfer Speed
Fast ATA/Enhanced IDE Compatible
8MB Cache Buffer
100% Fluid Dynamic Bearing Motors

...because of the 8Mb of cache and ATA/133Mhz.

Have you looked at Seagate HD's?

 

[Zero Shift]

Don't bother with Maxtors. I have had 4 of them, and 3 of them are dead. The fourth one, sadly, is on it's last legs as well. ^^;;;
I suggest Quantum and Western Digital over Maxtor products...

 

[mikesgroovin]

Well, I hate to confuse you even more but I've had some experiences over the past 15 years that I'd like to share that might conflict with the above.

I have had nothing but bad experiences with Western Digital drives. EVERY ONE that I have had has gone dead on me and I have had to return them. However, I don't want to totally bash them as the drives that did go dead were all 40GB or less in capacity.
On the Maxtor end...I have never had a Maxtor drive go bad.....every Maxtor I have is running great.

It should come down these factors....
You want 8MB of cache....
You want a drive that runs at 7200rpm
You want a good warranty...
You want a trusted brand...personally I would recommend Seagate and Maxtor.


Hope that helps!

-Michael

 

[ekÆsine]

mikesgroovin, that's very contradictory to what tech4hire said. i think you guys have successfully confused this guy. either way i think we agree that more cache is better, opt for the 8MB cache maxtor rather than the 2MB maxtor. so that really narrows your choice to 2 drives.

maxtors seem to have faster access times than western digital drives. although most westwern digital are IDE 100MB/sec and mators usually are 133MB/sec, i've heard the WD scsi drives run pretty damn fast. i think those are called raptor drives?

in my opinion whichever you buy, make backups of your data. by backup i mean which files would make you go insane if you lost them? save those using different file versions if major changes are made to the file.

for example lets say you edit text documents or images. and you regularly update your backups and there was a major change to an image file. if you had backed up this image file with the major changes to it there is no way to get a version of that image before the changes were made.

this can also be a pain if you made a major change to a document and lost that file and your backup was too old and didn't have the changes in them. so making different versions of the same file can help

but thats hypocritical of me to say that i guess since i just backup the bare minimum to save time and because i'm lazy

 

[Erik]

i have a seagate barracuda 7,200 rpm 80gb. it's really really quiet, fast, and looks kinda shiny too...ahh...shiny...anyways, it was 70 bucks from newegg. i buy everything from there. i'd get it