Best HD make for PC

[NT]

Er, a pre-coffee moment. Modern windows won't like the change of primary hdd. One of many reasons to stop using an OS that deliberately makes your life hard in so many ways.

NT

[tony sayer]

So really who's left then that is recommended?..

Anyone?.....

[Dave Liquorice]

IIRC Maxtor are Seagate that didn't make the grade to be Seagate... ie you'll find identical drive specs apart from the MTBF and warranty period.

I've only had one HD failure in about 30 years of using PC's in a domestic enviroment but with machines on 24/7 or for long periods (>12hrs/day). That failure was a new drive in a new machine, it died within a month of so of purchase and was replaced under warranty.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Did a little Googling and got a free utility called HDcopy. That copies the entire HD to another. To use the second one as the main you have to swap the master slave jumpers and start from a boot disc with FDISK. Good enough for what I need. Much quicker than re-installing the OS and apps in event of an HD failure.

[D.M.Chapman]

It's interesting that the SAN manufacturers are now all pimping how green they are by offering the chance to spin down blocks of disks overnight (or whatever).

Sure it saves a bit of power and cooling - I wonder what the impact of the (I assume) increased rate of failure is. We've had three fail in a SAN of 180 spindles in well under 12 months... (two SATA, one SAS).

Darren

[Tim Watts]

Dave Liquorice wibbled on Thursday 25 March 2010 09:31

Home (systems running 24/7):

One Quantum died in early 2000s, replaced under warranty. One Seagate died, ditto. On WD, ditto. I think that's it.

Work (nearly 100 servers, 1/2 dozen raid units, mix of SATA and SCSI (many sub types):

30% failure of Maxtors in one batch of 24 over a few months; Large scale diffuse failures of "those" IBM Deathstars - but over half recovered after running the IBM disk util and remained working.

Fairly small % failure levels on Seagates, WD and Fujitsu. Many of the Seagates were SCSI (better made) and many of the latter where SATA were enterprise class (better made) so those results are reasonably good.

WD enterprise class seem to be one of the better grade these days, but I've had good results with ordinary grade SATA Seagate 7200.10, Hitachi and Samsung.

WRT to my old PCs, I have a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 SATA that's been happy for about 6 years, and various Seagate PATA drivers that have been happy for over 8 years, except one Seagate Barracuda ATA V that is a bit unhappy.

[D.M.Chapman]

Heh, I'd say steer clear of WD. Apart from the famous IBM deathstar issue, recent Hitachi drives have been fine. Saying that, I'm looking at an email alert at the mo :)

Failed Drive information : HITACHI HDS721010 Drive operation time : 270 d

so they aren't all great :-)

As plenty of people have said, they all suck. Use HDs assuming they will die soon. Then it's a nice surprise when they don't. Enterprise SANs from Hitachi don't use all Hitachi drives - they deliberately have a mix to avoid deathstar like incidents :)

Darren

[Corporal Jones]

I use Macrium Reflect free edition on all my PC's, easy to restore from a boot cd.

[Jules Richardson]

If cost (and physical space) wasn't the overriding factor, maybe we'd see HDAs with little friction clutches between the motors and spindles - slipping the clutch a little on startup could work wonders for motor longevity... :-)

Or go back to the good 'ol belt-drive days - easy to change belt tension on the fly...

cheers

Jules

[Jules Richardson]

But it would have been fun to try... :-)

I think I'll give that a go next time I encounter idiots masquerading as tech vendors.

[Jules Richardson]

Urgh. CDs and DVDs are crippled in equal ways... prone to dust, dirt, scratches, fingerprints, decay over time, and the real biggie: I've seen too many cases where a disc created on one drive is completely unreadable in a different drive. I really wouldn't want to have a drive fail only to find that its replacement wouldn't read any of my stuff.

OK for transient stuff between two 'known' drives, but I wouldn't trust them for anything critical such as a backup.

There's that, too. I don't want to piss around waiting to see if my backup works or not - I just want it to work first time, every time.

cheers

Jules

[MM]

I have never had an unreadable CD/DVD. Maybe I have been 'lucky'. But instead I rather suspect that you are in fact exaggerating their flakiness. Heck, I even have 5¼" floppies from the 1980s that are perfectly readble. Proper storage under the right conditions is the key.

As for waiting around, it takes mere minutes to burn a full DVD and far less time to burn a single folder.

Also, with my backups I don't just have the ONE CD/DVD, but dozens over months. So if one were to fail, I'd still have another ten recent ones.

MM

[dennis]

Err, windows doesn't care, I have swopped D: and C: on many occasions and windows vista and seven still work. Some of the games can't find their saves though.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I agree completely.

I tried it once. Wouldn't understand my file names. Couldn't add to the archiove.

Already had to cross mount machine's DVD dribes to read stuff on one that didnt work on another.

Then I looked at the cost..of a 5 DVD set every night..non reusable.

nah. second disk drive. Or a flash drive.

DVDS are not a fit for purpose general backup medium.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Home written CD/DVD have a habit of failing after a few years - so not ideal as an archive medium.

[Man at B&Q]

I've never had a CD fail in over 7 years.

I haven't had DVD burning for more than a couple of years so can't comment.

MBQ

[Clive George]

Floppy?!!!

Who still uses them?

[Clive George]

+1 on that - seems to work well. I have used it in anger too (recovery from user cockup, not hardware).

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Plenty of reports of ones which have. I've got a couple of home burnt (not by me) data CDs which did work once but not now. Perhaps 10 years old. Audio CD is likely more robust because of error correction.

I suspect they'll be the same.

[MM]

Utter nonsense.

MM