Which HDD to get?

[DyslexicHobo]

I've been looking to get a new hard drive, and it appears that the 200GB drives give the best price/capacity ratio...

However, I see so many different models and features that I don't understand the meaning of.

Some questions I have:

-What is NCQ (Native Command Queueing)? I hear that it's a great feature to have, but I could be mistaken.
-Is the advertised "average seek time" very important?
-I have a 1 40GB Maxtor drive now, along with a 160GB Samsung. I don't have a problem with the noise they make, are they considered noisy, quiet, or in the middle?


These are a couple of drives that I was looking at that seemed good:
Seagate
Maxtor

 

[DyslexicHobo]

Bump.

 

[SaberDicer]

I hear good things about both companies, although these boards tend to say maxtor sucks and seagate is great. I just bought that seagate drive (havent installed yet) But I have a 6yr old maxtor that still runs perfectly.

 

[Jotho]

From what I've read, I believe Samsung drives are among the most reliable/quiet/highest performance ones available. I have a Seagate 120GB SATA drive, and am quite pleased. Seagates are supposed to be fairly quiet compared to some other manufacturers.

NCQ is a fairly new feature that isn't widely support yet as far as I know. Seagate made a few NCQ-enabled drives, but I'm pretty sure they require special motherboard support. Newer chipsets may have some NCQ capability.

Personally? I's say most 200GB 7,200 RPM 8MB cache drives will perform fairly similarly and you would probably be happy with any choice.

 

[ts3433]

NCQ seems to be useful only in a server environment ATM. You also need a chipset that supports it.

You'll have to ask others about the average seek time statistic, which I'd wager is a small factor in performance between drives.

Samsungs are considered pretty quiet, as are Seagates. WDs without fluid bearings seem to be the noisiest. (I have a WD myself and it's not very loud for me, but I don't know if it has FDB or not.)

 

[Budman]

Originally posted by: SaberDicer
I hear good things about both companies, although these boards tend to say maxtor sucks and seagate is great. I just bought that seagate drive (havent installed yet) But I have a 6yr old maxtor that still runs perfectly.

Hurry up & install it, right now your sig is lying.

 

[AristoV300]

I have had nothing but good experiences with Seagate HD's. NCQ allows for the drive to prioritize commands. I believe that it is only available on the NForce 4 boards.

 

[Texun]

You're going to get a billion replies to go with Seagate over Maxtor. Seagates are quiet and have a 5 year warranty. I personally haven't had very good luck with Seagate but that's just my experience. At the moment I am very partial to Samsung drives. They are exceptionally quiet and the 3 year warranty isn't bad at all.

NCQ is basically a more efficient method of data management used by the hard drive but you need support for it. As HDs have increased in size, the time required to find the needed information has also increased. There's a lot of data to sort through while the drive looks for the proper sector, FAT and file or information. NCQ is a more optimized method of writing and reading the data. There's a lot more to NCQ than that but it should give you some idea of what it is and why it is needed.

Regarding the seek\access times: Yes it is important, but as long as you get a drive with 8 megs of cache and at least 7200RPM you would probably never feel the difference. From the two you have listed I would say the Seagate has your name on it.