# hard drive suggestions

## flazz

i'm thinking of another hard drive for my home computer.

currently i have a WD 80GB 7,200 .... as / and that's it. i want /home (already 60GB) on another drive.

i'm thinking something around Ultra ATA 250GB but i'm not up on whats going on in hardware, (i have a MSI K7N2 Delta-L motherboard)

for a  while i was paranoid to buy anything but WD, is that still the case?

anyone have any reccomendations?

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## YopWongSapn

Well, I've had excellent experiences with the newer WD drives, as well as Seagate and Maxtor.  I would recommend any of those, but I would personally choose Seagate.  Their drives tend to have a higher buffer for the same price as a lower buffer in others.  If you're going for something as big as 250gb, don't get a drive with a buffer less than 8mb...otherwise you'll be waiting forever and a day while it accesses your data.  I have a Maxtor 200gb with a 4mb buffer...extremely stable drive in my experience, but takes forever to read data.

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## blueworm

I use seagate. They are not the fastest but they are silent. I have heard to many horror stories about IBM/hitachi Deathstars, so maybe those are the ones to avoid.

Play safe stick to maxtor, WD or seagate.

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## codergeek42

I'm quite pleased with my Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (ATA/133, 120 GB, 8 MB cache). It's fast and silent; and it wasn't very expensive either.

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## Kyrra

Seagate, Western Digital, and Maxtor are all good brand names.  There is also the Hitachi/IBM line; these have become a lot better since the whole "DeathStar" incident a few years back.  From what I've seen, Hitachi will produce hard drives reliable as the other manufactures out there.

There is only one reason I would choose Maxtor over the rest of the competition.  They upped the MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) on their Desktop drives (SATA/IDE) to be 1 million hours.  This is really amazing, since you normally don't see an MTBF of 1 million hours unless you are dealing with enterprise drives (Fibre channel and such).  Those 1 million hours are from a statistical sample though, so you can only take those numbers with a grain of salt.  But Maxtor has a 3 year warranty on the DiamonMax 10 drive lines, but if you spend an extra $30, you get the MaxLine drives, which have a 5 year warranty on them.  The only thing I can tell that differs between the 2 drives is how they pick them off the assembly line.  They test the MaxLine drives more intensely to make sure there aren't any defects in the drives.

But you know, any of the 4 major drive vendors will give you great results.  These companies can't stay in business if they sell drives that consistently fail after a month.  Find a drive that you feel comfortable buying and seems to be a good price, and get that one.

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## flazz

thanks for all the replies.

i think i'm going to go for a EIDE 250 with 8MB cache and 7200 rpm, all 4 brands offer one, and they are all within the $127-$129 range, I'm kinda leaning towards seagate because i havent read anything bad yet.

how much better is Ultra ATA 133 than Ultra ATA 100? my motherboard supports 133, but only maxtor makes a 133 drive.

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## codergeek42

Also, it's a bit old, but my Quantum Fireball AS20.5 (ATA/100, 2 MB cache, ~19.7.GB) has been working like a champ for almost 3 years now (it's my /dev/hdb  :Wink: )

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## blueworm

 *codergeek42 wrote:*   

> Also, it's a bit old, but my Quantum Fireball AS20.5 (ATA/100, 2 MB cache, ~19.7.GB) has been working like a champ for almost 3 years now (it's my /dev/hdb )

 I have also have a fujitsu quantum fireball 30Gb, it must be 3 years old works like a champ in wife's PC.

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## codergeek42

Yea. They may not be the best and fastest around but damn these things are friggin reliable  :Very Happy: 

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