Which IDE manufacturer has the best data integrity features?

[giocopiano]

When considering purchasing a new IDE drive I went around the manufacturers' websites. Unfortunately, only IBM is gushing in detail about their hard drive innovations. I like the idea of no-ID sector formatting. nullIBM
Maxtor are very uninformative about their data integrity. They only want to tell you how fast they are. I am a little suspicious that their HD utility is called "Maxblast software". It does not indicate a mature approach nullMaxtor
Seagate not much better. Seagate
WD have material. WD
I saw a long article at the PCguide on HD technology but am not sure what the manufacturers are implementing.
PC Guide on Hard Drives

 

[Peter]

There is no such thing as data integrity protection on IDE drives. See other thread ("why IDE only 7200 rpm" or something).

 

[giocopiano]

What you say doesn't make sense. IDE drives employ ECC and IBM use no-ID sector formatting to mark bad sectors in solid state memory, and remap their physical locations to somewhere undamaged.
Anyone else?

 

[Peter]

So? There is no protection of data during writes, no automatic remapping of bad sectors that occur in the lifespan of the product (just of those that were there at build time), neither on reads nor on writes.

No-ID is just a means of squeezing more data onto the track (eliminating sector headers), at the expense of losing an entire track when a spot goes bad, not just a sector. ECC has ever been there, without it, there'd be no reading at all - everyone does that, just not everyone is making a marketing buzz about it. IDE drives also do not have spare capacity to replace newly occurring bad sectors.

SCSI HDDs detect weak writes and reads, and instantly move the data to a known good spare sector - without the host system ever noticing, and - on writes - before the originally transmitted data expire from the drive's cache. With an IDE drive, data written to a bad spot goes unnoticed until reading them back is attempted. Way too late. Even with "Verify" turned on (which halves performance), all you get is an error condition toward the host system, which, thanks to caching, buffering and multitasking, will very probably be unable to recreate the data that just failed to be written.

Altogether, there is a HUGE difference in data integrity from IDE to SCSI HDDs.

 

[giocopiano]

You write opinionatedly. Can you back it up with links for us?
Don't you have any more respect for one manufacturer than another in the IDE field?

 

[Peter]

Opinionated? No. Just not blinded by marketing ... and with field experience reaching back to when SCSI and IDE were invented.

Just go read the whitepapers on SCSI drives on the IBM and Seagate web sites, to get a better idea about to what length SCSI drives go. Then you'll see for yourself what IDE drives are lacking.

From my real world experience (18 years with SCSI drives, and IDE ever since it came out shortly thereafter, in on-site repairs, commercial computer maintenance, and personal experience), it's pretty obvious. I haven't had a SCSI drives that failed during operation, all those I retired were fine but outgrown and replaced with larger ones, while from failed IDE drives I could build a house ... and if I had $10 for every scandisk or format run to hunt down a bad sector, I'd be really rich.

IDE is for cheap storage in personal computers where not much important data is stored. If you're serious about your data, put them on SCSI. And back them up regularly anyway - the user still is the worst predator of user data.

Now whom to trust the most in IDE? Well if you ask me, there's little. Every manufacturer has had their bad models or production runs among their usually solid stuff. Whether it's Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi (IBM), Samsung, Excelstor (Conner), makes little difference. You choose by price, performance and noise.

regards, Peter