One Hard Drive Thread to Rule Them All...

[MisterDuck]

I doubt IBM will ever make an IDE drive with an 8 meg cache because it would directly compete with their SCSI line of drives - western digital, on the other hand, doesn't have a big SCSI presence so I don't think they care if they trounce 10k SCSI drives.

Although the 120GXP drive looks fast, from all the benchmarks I've seen I don't think it can take a 1000JB or even touch a 1200JB in anything but general transfer rate - which isn't really indicative of how fast a drive "feels". The 1200JB was besting 10k SCSI drives, and coming close to competing with the top of the line 10k drives that cost double the money in the Storagereview.com review (which I consider to be very, very good articles - some of the best in the buisness), and utterly burning any other competitor. In addition, you can buy the thing for 260 at googlegear.com - less than the 120 gig GXP with a 2 meg cache - it seems like a no brainer to me.

I'm really looking forward to a head to head comparison of the two, although I think the JB is going to clearly dominate - but from all practical perspectives, I doubt the average person could even notice a difference between the two in daily use, so I guess it comes down to dollars and preference - in which case, I choose dollars and the (marginally) better performance of the JB.

If you're not interested in server environments or paying five hundred to irk out that last five percent of performance, there's no need for SCSI anymore - drives like the WD1200JB and the IBM 120GXP prove that, with little doubt.

 

[Mavrick007]

Yes you can buy the WD 1200JB for about the same price as the IBM 120GXP 120Gig.. but you can't get the 1200JB in anything smaller than 120gigs, and I can get almost 2 x 80gig 120GXP drives for the price of one 1200JB. I'm not saying that one is better than the other, even though I'd rather have the WD 1200JB, but in a smaller size. I'd hate to lose 120Gigs of data at once. Speed isn't everything either, I'd rather have reliability even if it did cost me a bit of speed.

 

[mee987]

this relates to a post earlier in this thread--

My maxtor 30gig 7200rpm (rated at 8.9ms avg seek) drives has a bad case of "up-and-down"age in HDtach itself. I REALLY doubt that it is because of open applications or something like that, for 2 reasons:
1. I close EVERYTHING but hdtach and it still does it
2. The ups and downs occur at the same physical locations on the disk each time. For example, it wil go up and down until it hits about the 2gb mark, then it starts reading at a high constant rate. Then at about the 6gb mark it starts jumping all over the place again. This same pattern happens EVERY time I run the test.

I would really like to get to the bottom of this. Now I know the first posts will all be about via 4-in-1 drivers, so lets get that out of the way right now. In HDtach, the buffered read speed averages between 70 and 80MB/s. I dont think I would be able to achieve those speeds if I didnt already have DMA enabled and all of that.

I personally think there is a problem with the drive itself. With AM (acoustic management) totally disabled for fastest seek times I have still never seen a seek time of under 18ms in HD tach. Kinda sucks, my old quantum 6.4gb (rated at <10ms seek) gets scores of about 14ms every time.

Has anyone else experienced problems like this? Id greatly appreciate any input, Im really running out of ideas on this one. Feel free to post your own drive models and HD tach scores/results.

Think I should move this to a new post?

 

[WyteWatt]

My HDtach results are just about in a straight line but they go downward alittle but they never have spikes like those other HDtach results. I do not run anything when doing the HDtach test. But if i start moving my mouse, opening a program, etc then i see spikes happening.

Thank You.

 

[bugsysiegel]

<< my friend's mother's family company had tons of WD HDs die at the same time after a year or so. fast doesn't mean reliable. >>




Oddly, I've had only good luck (so far) with WD drives, now Maxtor on the other hand, I have an 80GB, a 60GB, 2-40GB's, and 2-20GB's sitting here that not only are dead, they are (were) louder and slower than my 2 WD's. Oh, and Maxtor is basically refusing to give me an RMA on any of them because they were a) purchased at a store which has since gone under (not sure why that matters, but it does to maxtor) b) lost/missing receipts (even though manuf. date is on the drive, and it is within 3 years of that date) c) just plain doesn't care because I don't have the buying power of a huge corporation, apparently.

Just out of curiosity, how long after service date did your friend's mother's family's hard drives start developing problems?

 

[kgraeme]

Notice that while the Barracuda is the quietest drive, it's low in speed? Inverse correlation, maybe?

BTW, my WD BB drive is still working, but it's gotten quite a loud whine with age. So much so that I can't stand using it anymore.

 

[jh0sken612]

<< Yes you can buy the WD 1200JB for about the same price as the IBM 120GXP 120Gig.. but you can't get the 1200JB in anything smaller than 120gigs, and I can get almost 2 x 80gig 120GXP drives for the price of one 1200JB. I'm not saying that one is better than the other, even though I'd rather have the WD 1200JB, but in a smaller size. I'd hate to lose 120Gigs of data at once. Speed isn't everything either, I'd rather have reliability even if it did cost me a bit of speed. >>



I would rather keep it down to one drive, unless u r running RAID... and get the speed of the 8MB of cache. 2x80gb drives would be louder, slower, and IMO not worth it