Who Makes The Best IDE Hard Drive?

Sephiroth_IX

Diamond Member
Oct 22, 1999
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Myself, i like the MAxtor Diamondmaxes.

The IBM is the best IDE hard drive, but the compatibility issues, although not IBM's fault, make it less of an option.
 

Noriaki

Lifer
Jun 3, 2000
13,640
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I like the Quantum Fireball Plus LM for it's excellent seek times.
Apperntly it's fairly loud though.

I personally love the IBM 75GXP, and it's what I use, though with this Win9x issue that might not be a great choice....it seems that this issue doens't happen in Windows NT, so when Whistler comes out this guy should be back at the top of the list.

Personally I also very much like Western Digital, though they have a bad rep lately.

I'm going to say overall the IBM 75GXP is the best, but the Maxtor DMax+45 is a good choice to if you use Win9x.
 

roc919

Senior member
Dec 6, 1999
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My vote to the IBM 75 GXPs, but wasn't there a post about problems with them on winME?
 

dcdomain

Diamond Member
Jan 30, 2000
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Might be talking about the raid feature on the Abit board? Not sure. [update]: Whoops... guess not. Never heard about those WinMe/98 problems before...

Anyway, I hold the same view, I personally buy Maxtor because they have been so great recently. Best bang for the buck. To me, the extra money isn't worth it for the performance you get on an IBM drive. If money isn't an issue, get the IBM drives.
 

Noriaki

Lifer
Jun 3, 2000
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The 75GXP has an issue where if your CPU is fast enough win9x will shut down the system before the 75gxp has a chance to finish writing all it's cache data out to physical disk, and you can have lost/corrupt data.

There is a patch from Microsoft to fix this.
 

Fumiup

Senior member
Sep 24, 2000
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It wasn't just the IBM drives that are affected. Any hard drive with large caches is affected by it. It only pertained to users of Win98SE/WinME. Microsoft has released a patch for Win98SE/WinME.
 

AmdEmAll

Diamond Member
Aug 27, 2000
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Ive only heard the IBM GXP drives were affected. Where did you hear it was all high speed drives?
 

Dulanic

Diamond Member
Oct 27, 2000
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The IBM or Maxtor.... IBM edges out slightly in performance and Maxtor edges out for price/performance.
 

Fumiup

Senior member
Sep 24, 2000
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I meant large caches. Computers with large caches and fast processors shut down too fast before the cache is flushed so you lose data when shutting down, because the cache of the HDD is not entirely flushed when Windows is turning off the computer
 

erub

Diamond Member
Jun 21, 2000
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Own 1 IBM 75GXP, and two Maxtors (27 gig and 8 gig) - both are fine. I have a dead WD on my hands here, well it is so trashed of bad sectors I consider it dead. Don't buy them.
 

Kwad Guy

Diamond Member
Dec 1, 1999
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Like everyone else, all I can offer is anecdotal evidence. But
I have dealt with a lot of IDE hard drives over the past couple
of years, and the only ones that have failed are Western Digital.
At this point, I wouldn't recommend WD to anyone.

IBM and Maxtor are both nice. Quantum are fast enough,
but are WAY WAY too loud. No excuse.

For price/performance, Maxtor has been the market leader for the
past year or so...

Kwad
 

LXi

Diamond Member
Apr 18, 2000
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Quantum, Maxtor and IBM(I dont like them anymore due to negative influences by IBM zealots)

Maxtor is my favorite.
 

Jaraxal

Senior member
Oct 9, 1999
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IBM invents and patents more new technologies than any other company. They many not kick A$$ on personal computers per se, but their technology rocks. It's hard to argue that.

That being said, you simply can't go wrong with an IBM drive. Seagates aren't that bad either. I have yet to have a problem with the 6 Seagates I have at home, nor the 100+ I use at work.

Don't buy Western Digital? Huh? WD licenses much of their drive technology from IBM and for most purposes are very nearly identical. Heck I still have a couple of 6.4GB WD drives from about 3 years ago that are going strong. And my 18GB WD works just as well as the Seagates I have.

I have very little experience with Quantum or Maxtor.

What you will find though is a whole heck of a lot of brand loyalty. There are those that speak from experience and then there are ZEALOTS. Your best bet is to take your own experiences and meld it with what you read/hear from other people.

My list? IBM, Seagate, Western Digital. I won't buy anything else. But I'm not going to bad mouth the other brands ...
 

Imported

Lifer
Sep 2, 2000
14,679
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I've always had good experience with IBM and their harddrives. Sure, I might have broken the molex pins on my 75GXP, but they replaced it at no charge. :)