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[POLL] Which hard disk to choose?

I

imported_Phil

Diamond Member
.... but this time I've tried to make it a little interesting.

I'm in the market for a 200Gb 7200rpm 8Mb cache IDE drive to replace my Maxtor DM9+ 60Gb drive which is rapidly filling up, and to go alongside my other DM9+ 120Gb. The choices I have are listed in the poll, as well as below with my personal pros and cons of each one. Which one to choose? 🙂
Note, all the drives are within £10 of each other here in the UK, so price is not a consideration here.

Hitachi 7k250 200Gb PATA
PRO: Supposed to be one of the fastest drives in its class.
CON: Deathstar.....

Maxtor DM9+ 200Gb PATA
PRO: Again, supposed to be a very fast drive, the 120Gb DM9+ I have is very quick.
CON: My 120Gb drive (and all >120Gb DM9+ drives I've seen) has/have noisy seeks. AMSET will take care of that, but at a performance penalty.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 200Gb PATA
PRO: Quietness, which is important to me.
CON: I've heard that they're not the fastest thing out there. Noise levels come at a sacrifice, apparently 🙂

Western Digital 200JB 200Gb PATA
PRO: People swear by them, and they're fast drives.
CON: The WD-1-year-old-motor-whine noise that I've seen several times.

So, your thoughts, people? As you can see, this isn't all about speed here. Speed is good, but I'm after a good-all-rounder too.

Thanks in advance 🙂
 
My vote:

Whichever is least expensive. If you are willing to get any of them, then none of them have that one thing you must have. Just get whatever is cheapest and save some cash for other things. I know you said otherwise, but if nothing else matters all that much, price is the only consideration IMO. If you still don't want to pick based on cost, pick a feature that is most important to you. Also, I don't know that your Hitachi con is acurate. It is the same brand, but if I recall only a specific model (two models?) were aptly named "Deathstar". Other Hitachi/IBM drives were excellent and as good as everyone elses. Every manufacturer will have a "Deathstar" product at some point, that is no reason to unfairly lable all it's product bad. Just my opinion.

\Dan
 
Hitachis are terrible. Yea, they're fast. They're pretty quiet too. However, they are VERY unreliable. I've been talking to the owner of a fairly new local computer store, and he told me that he's bought 10 Hitachis in the course of the past few months and 4 have already failed.

I put a Seagate 120gb 7200.7 8mb cache PATA drive in my second computer yesterday. It's pretty quiet, but not silent like I was hoping for. Idle is almost silent, but there's a faint high pitched noise audible from within 5ft of the tower. It's similar to the sound the high pitched noise that TVs emit. I'm pretty happy with it though. It really outperforms my Western Digital WD400JB (40gb, 8mb cache). The WD400JB scored about 16500 in SiSoft 2004 and the Seagate did about 26000 🙂 Windows feels a bit faster, and the CPU in that computer is even slower (1700+ vs. 2500+).

My WD400JB failed on me after only about 7 months and I had to RMA it. That sucked. Luckily I was able to get my data back by letting it cool down. Besides that, both drives have been annoyingly loud. I hate them. EDIT: OH YEA...this drive had a 3 year warranty, but the replacement drive that WD sent me had a warranty that ended only 6 months from the time it was RMA'ed. So, they cheated me out of 2 years of warranty service :disgust:

I also have a Seagate 40gb 7200.7 2mb cache drive in my print server and it's almost as fast as the WD400JB. It sounds identical to the new 120gb drive I installed yesterday.

I've also have a Maxtor 40gb 7200rpm 2mb cache drive. It's not that fast, but it's pretty quiet and hasn't failed after over a year of use.

I voted Seagate. Their drives can outperform my WD 8mb cache drive, they're quieter, and they're more reliable. Excellent choice 🙂
 
I've got a WD800JB myself (80GB 8MB) and have had it for over 2 years now. It's been running 24/7 short of hardware upgrades and dusting. Last I ran Sandra 2004 was several months ago however it gave a score of 40MB/s (for what it's worth anyway). It's been a solid drive, no complaints. I've recommended WD's 8MB cache drives to a few friend's and they've been happy with their drives as well.

I was researching the Hitachi 7K250 line of drives a few months back when I was hdd shopping. They're very fast drives but had one major turn off for me. Many people have complained about the drive making a loud 'screeching' noise at regular intervals (~10 minutes). Some compared the sound to that of a cat meowing which could easily be heard from another room. Official word from Hitachi was that it's some sort of diagnostic process done while the drive is idle in order to improve it's reliability. Here's a thread about it with more links in it with additional info.
 
I'm stuck on Seagate right now, I just bought both a 160GB External Firewire drive and an internal 160GB 7200.7 SATA from them. Very satisfied with both, and they are quiet. Differences in HD speed are not going to even be noticable to you unless you are comparing to a Raptor or something, and even then it's not much. To be fair, I've also had good experiences with Maxtor. I've heard some bad things about WD, but I think they're probably fine as well.
 
i voted for IBM/hitachi, you always have a chance of getting a lemon for any product.. for instance, my spinpoint80 that croaked on me big time taking all my precious data with it. the vast majority seem to be generally content with this product when i had two consecutive failures (the replacement i got from samsung went kaput in less than a week)

i am using a seagate now.. yeah it sure is damned quiet but does it matter how loud it gets when you read/write? what matters more is idle noise imo...
 
I've had a 120gb 8mb cache Hitachi Deathstar over a year and it's been flawless and faster than the WD version I have, so that's my pick, the deathstar :evil:
 
Thanks for your input so far guys, there's an interesting mix of results there. People seem to love their Hitachi drives, but then there's the "miaowing" problem. Haven't seen it first-hand myself, but that kinda warns me off the drive. StorageReview don't seem to rate the Seagate drive for performance too much, and I've heard the Western Digital whiney motor noise from a drive that was ten months old. Not a good sign.

Having flicked through the rest of StorageReview, it seems that they also rate the Maxtor MaxLine II Plus drives- 250Gb and supposedly excellent reliability. The place I buy my computer stuff from has them on offer so they're about £15 more expensive than the 200Gb regular Maxtor DM9+ drives. Any thoughts on these drives?
 
Assuming the price/cost was exactly the same for all of the models' I'd suggest the Seagate.
In my experience, Seagate drives tend to be more reliable than deathstars, WDs, and Maxtors. The fluid Bearing drives that Seagate uses have so far been great to me. I have lost several IBM drives, several WD drives, and Several maxtor drives over the years. I have only had one seagate go bad (a 40GB).

Seagate (at least in the past) has had the easiest/most pain free RMA process
Maxtor, IBM', and WD all have acceptable RMA processes too IMO.

The Seagate IDE drives are quiet.

I avoid Hitachi/IBM like the plague currently. That is due to both of my 75GXPs failing as well as the horrible reputation IBM had with the 75GXP and 60GXP lines. I do own a 120GXP, and so far it has been good to me.

My recent Maxtor drives (couple of 120Giggers and an 80GB drive) have been good to me, as have my recent WD drives (several 120GB drives, and a 200gb, some JB and one BB) These are a bit louder than my Seagate drives (I have 2 x 200GB seagates, as well as a 160GB and a couple of 120GB drives)





I have a slight preferenco towards Seagate, but they are all fine companies (though I am biased against Hitachi.) I would honestly buy the least expensive one, even if it only saves you 10 poiunds, those 10 pounds could be spent on a fan or something to keep the hard drive cooled. I have learned the hard way, that heat kills Hard drives.
 
This is a very nice poll. 🙂

My vote is for the Seagate for reasons of reliability (personal & reputation), silence and because it also offers reasonable performance too. It might not be the fastest drive out there but it's still pretty fast.
 
I'd go with the best price, but i guess the Seagate, then the WD if prices are all the same.
 
From the fact that you're remarking about seek noise, AMSET and so on, I'd say the 7200.7 because it's quiet and will stay quiet (fluid bearings). Samsungs are reputed to be even quieter, or that's what people have been saying, so you might look at those if quietness comes at that high a priority for you.

At home I have a 40GB 7200.7 with 2MB cache and the performance ranks as "dismal" for a current-generation 7200rpm ATA drive, according to my SmileMark benchmark results. "Ineffectual flailing" is the phrase coming to mind. But I'm accustomed to my 15000rpm Cheetahs at work, so that's probably part of the problem here 😉 I expect the 8MB-cache 200GB model would be a better performer, too.
 
I have to agree with the Hitachi fans. I really like Hitachi SATA drives, and have never had a problem with any Hitachi drive. I have a 4GB IBM drive that is still working. Everybody has different experiences.

If you look at the comments section on Newegg, you'll see Western Digital doesn't get a lot of negative comments, but they get more than the other manufacturers. WD drives are the loudest, have the most failures, a lot of them don't use FDB, and they're ambiguous about model numbers (so a slower 80GB drive with 40GB platters has the same model number as a faster one with one 80GB platter).

I would not get a drive without a 3-year warranty, though. That's why I'm not going to say "WD sucks," as long as you're smart enough to get a Special Edition. Some drives fail, that's just the way it is, which is why a 3-year warranty is on the top of my priority list. In my experience, if a drive lasts 2 years, it'll probably last 5+ years.

I would always go with Hitachi SATA drives because they're the fastest, they're quiet, and they have a 3-year warranty. Hitachi's PATA drives have a 2GB cache and a 1-year warranty, though. For PATA, I would prefer to go with a Samsung drive.

(of course, for a pure performance system I'm going to recommend the 74GB Raptor with its amazing 5-year warranty)

The way I would rank the PATA drives are:
#1: Seagate (only the 8MB models with the 3-year warranty)
#2: Samsung
#3: Maxtor (only the 8MB models with the 3-year warranty)
#4: WD (only the 8MB models with the 3-year warranty)

I'll go with Seagate if I can, but only a few of their models have the 8mb cache and 3-year warranty, so across the board as a safer PATA recommendation I recommend Samsung in general. They're both nice quiet drives, but the Seagates are a little faster.

For example, for your average cheap system, I'd just go with an 80GB drive, and it's going to be a Samsung, because for some reason Seagate doesn't put a 3-year warranty on any of their 80 GB drives, even the ones with 8MB cache.

Maybe Maxtor is a little faster than Samsung, but I'm still probably not going to pay extra for the 3-year model when all the Samsungs have a 3-year warranty.

So, I suppose I don't really rank Samsung all that high after all, but it just works out that I use them a lot because my recommendations are:

cheap system: PATA Samsung
mid-range: SATA Hitachi
high-end: Raptor 74G
 
Thanks for all the responses guys.
I have to say that I will never buy a Samsung drive- I've found them to be way too slow for what I want to do with a hard disk.

So, even though it goes against my poll 😉, it's a toss-up between the Maxtor Maxline Plus II 250Gb PATA drive and the Seagate 200Gb PATA drive (both with 8mb cache). The Seagate is £91 and the Maxtor is £116.
£25 for an extra 50Gb of storage space. The Seagate is 45p per gig, the Maxtor 46p. Can't decide!
 
yeah samsungs were really slow back in the days - not the case with newer spinpoint 80s. actually the one i had was FASTER and QUIETER than my current seagate 7200.7. its chugging along happily on my parents computer right now.

cool name btw 🙂
 
Originally posted by: DopeFiend
I have to say that I will never buy a Samsung drive- I've found them to be way too slow for what I want to do with a hard disk.
Click to expand...


If you add up the numbers, the Samsung is 2% slower in desktop performance and 5% faster in server performance. Not exactly "way too slow" anymore.

Maxtor vs. Samsung

I would get the Seagate, though. It's the fastest. You don't honestly think you'll be filling up that 200GB enough for it to be worth paying the exta, do you? Get some diversity with all those Maxtors in your machine 😉
 
I have/had one of each current generation 8MB cache drive from WD, Maxtor, and Seagate. My WD800JB had pretty loud seeks and idle. The Maxtor DM9+ 160GB I have also seeks pretty loud, so I had to use the AMSet to bring down the noise. But now it's a decent amount slower than my 7200.7, which is near inaudible in a relatively low noise desktop with the lid on. The 7200.7 is definitely the quietest (in terms of seeks, it's a bit quieter than when I bring the WD and Maxtors' volume down using AMSet) so it gets my recommendation.

As for performance concerns, check out this review. You'll see that the 7200.7, DM9+, and WDJB's perform extremely similarly. The 7200.7 is no slower than the other tested current gen. 8MB cache disks.
 
Originally posted by: Ionizer86
I have/had one of each current generation 8MB cache drive from WD, Maxtor, and Seagate. My WD800JB had pretty loud seeks and idle. The Maxtor DM9+ 160GB I have also seeks pretty loud, so I had to use the AMSet to bring down the noise. But now it's a decent amount slower than my 7200.7, which is near inaudible in a relatively low noise desktop with the lid on. The 7200.7 is definitely the quietest (in terms of seeks, it's a bit quieter than when I bring the WD and Maxtors' volume down using AMSet) so it gets my recommendation.

As for performance concerns, check out this review. You'll see that the 7200.7, DM9+, and WDJB's perform extremely similarly. The 7200.7 is no slower than the other tested current gen. 8MB cache disks.
Click to expand...

Ah, you make a good point about the noise levels, I hadn't really thought about that enough.
Looks like it's the Seagate then; I'll post some ATTO / HDTach / FileCopy results within the next couple of days, benching it against my 60Gb and 120Gb Maxtors 😀

Thanks to all!
 
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