Hi,
currently i have 3 smaller HD’s. But i need some more storage and now i am thinking if it makes sense to buy just one big drive. Like 1,5 TB.
My only concern is, not sure how fast they can copy. I know some drives are sometimes fairly slow if they have so shovel datas from one place to another.
Do you guys have a tip what harddrive might be a good purchase? Currently i have WD hd’s and they never went bad. A Seagate went downhill within 3 days. Perhaps a lemon.
Anyway, let me know. Thanks
SSD Solid State hard drives are by far the fastest but as all new things are very expensive. The RPM your hard drive turns is the biggest factor in the speed your entire system will have. The older 5400 rpm were quite slow, most computers now come with 7200 rpm that is much faster but also slow the Seagate Cheetah Drive go up to 15000 rpm very fast but not as fast yet as SSD (like a flash drive but bigger no moving parts). The options don’t end there for you either as you can take multiple Hard-drives and combine them into a Raid0 striped setup that will be much faster and equals your smallest drive x 3 in size if you were to put your together. I can advise you on how to do this Raid setup on a Mac but you will have to ask one of the experts here to help you out with that. What ever you decide is best for you, make one of the drive you now have an external Back-up drive. Even if it is not very big at least you can use it to back up important files you have. It’s a good habit to get into having a once every month back-up of your files. More frequent backups are fine also as long as you do keep a once a month back-up on hand. Sometimes it takes a few days or weeks before you realize the change you made to something changed or corrupted a file you cannot do without.
I know this is just random information and not a direct you need this answer, all I am saying is the choices are vast so get what suits your needs.
Both Segate and Western Digital make good hard drives. My last failed drive was a WD, but that does not stop me from buying another. They also replaced it for free. Remeber that ALL hard drives will fail if you own it long enough. Do not put all your eggs, or files in one hard drive, keep extra copies of the important stuff in more than one place. Trust me on this people…
My advise is stick with 7200 RPM drives with 16 or 32 MB caches. 1-1.5 TB are very well priced right now. If you want to use it external, buy a separate USB drive enclosure as it will be free of the nonsense some prepacked drive/cases seem to have. If you can use eSata it is the fastest external, as it is just like having a drive installed inside, but the cable distance is very limited.
SSD’s are for the rich, or crazy (though I would like to become rich myself and have no problems with it. lol!) They cost too much however and offer too little of disk space for the money. When their price and space are equal to say a 10000 RPM drive, perhaps I will bite, but not until then.
These are just my thoughts on the subject.
Thank You,
Hi
What ever disk you buy for your data get two 
one for the backup. I
would also recommend an enterprise version for longer reliability I
use WD 500GB RE3’s and my Operating runs on a couple of WD 36GB
Raptors. The power-on hours for those two raptor drives is almost 41K
(4.6 years) and have 1 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count on 1 drive and 3 on the
other.
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
openSUSE 11.3 (i586) Kernel 2.6.34-12-desktop
up 3:35, 3 users, load average: 0.06, 0.04, 0.00
ASUS eeePC 1000HE ATOM N280 1.66GHz | GPU Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME
Seagate disks are the worst ones, it’s true. Choose WD or Samsung - I recommend them (running these 24/7 for 2 years without problems). 
I would Choose WD or Samsung Drive’s as well preferably a 7200RPM drive or higher. But, I would stay away from WD’s Green drives, I remember reading on these froums about people having problems with the green drives from WD. Nothing a quick search can provide you.
Cheers!
You may consider to go with one of those new WD Caviar Green drives. Some models (labelled EARS) have physical 4KB sectors which makes them faster. There is a caveat though: you have to create partitions with gparted and align logical sectors with the 4KB boundary. The default way of having first sector=63 will NOT work. Once properly formatted there is big joy with these drives.
Hey thanks.
Funny story. In my amiga days i used seagate, but over time they got a bad name somehow. Anyway we have the opposite experience.
But yes, it makes of course sense.
Just something really crazy. Do SCSI drives make any sense these days? I used them way back and they were usually much faster then IDE. But now with Sata not sure.
I will most likely put it in the case (internal) and replace my current drives. As someone said before, i will use one of the bigger ones as backup drive.
I am guessing that that was the problems with these drives like etech97 refered to?
The gparted part shouldn’t be to hard i think.
I will look in to it. The one suggestion with enterprise drives strike me too. Have to check. God, i wanted to build a new system but havent really the cash. Harddrive will be a must.
SCSI drives, if you can find them, don’t make any sense to me. I think a best buy would be two 1 TB 7200 rpm HD’s with 32 MB cache. WD or Segate as you like, bare drives where you supply everything else. I would load the OS on one and backup on the other. I keep a copy of all my online purchased software on both.
Thank You,
I prefer Maxtor and WD hard drives. I’m using Seagate (Barracuda 2007.12) for the first time and it’s the loudest hard drive I’ve ever used. And as for speed it’s on the 143th place on Ashampoo’s benchmark top list.
Maxtor is owned by Seagate now.
As for Western Digital, I’m a bit wary of them given the introduction of proprietary software/firmware embedded in their new Passport drives which forces one to use a virtual cd driver. These drives are not Linux frinedly are a real pain to deal with. Having said that, I am quite pleased with my current 2.5" 500GB scorpio blue drive.
i’ll only deal with WD and hitachi drives now.
every single other drive has failed prematurely - samsung, maxtor, seagates etc well within their warranty period.
i have the WD green 1tb drive; 7200rpm, 32mb cache and it’s fast; 80mb/s sustained speed.i’d buy another one in an instant for a full pc. i say full pc, since i have 2x sat in a readyNAS, and while there is a work-around to get it compatible with the readynas’s, it does disable the ‘green’ power management features. those issues were fixed in later firmware revisions though.
long story short - if for PC, get anything your happy with. if it’s for specialist use (ie: NAS) then check out the compatibility before you buy.
What ARE you guys doing with your drives? I have two Seagate Barracuda drives that I just replaced, both running just fine, that are 5 or 6 years old. I have a Maxtor drive that is going on 5 years old and will be replaced in the next couple of years.
Years ago, I purchased one of the first copies of NT 4.0 server that came out. I built a computer to run it. 50MZ 486 processor, 512 M ram, and a adaptec SCSI controller with 5 1G drives and a 7 disk CD changer. Once a year, for 10 years, I shut it down to change the processor fan and suck out several inches of dust. TEN YEARS – NO Failures!
Other than a bunch of Seagate 40 Meg drives, way back in the mid 1980s, I can’t remember having a hard drive failure.
Then again, my computers get shut down once a year for cleaning. Or, maybe maintenance. Well, the Windows boxes (make that box) get restarted regularly, but not powered off.
Bart
Seagate got a bad rep in the early 90’. A lot of burned drives.
I only had them a couple of times and last time (1 year ago or 2) it lastet only 3 days. My datas were lost. It might be a bad charge, possible. But WD drives are really quite. I like that and they never failed me. Anyway, i don’t put my hands in the fire for any manufacturer. Seagate and Maxtor SCSI drives were great. I used them, i even had a Seagate RLL drive once with 20 MB. lastet forever.
Well, the one thing i take from this is. Is does not matter what drive you have, but to make sure that you format it in the right way.
I read a couple of times to set to the 4k sector size since if you don’t the performance takes a dip.
Not sure if that applies to all drives or just particular ones. I might have to check mine.
Seagate is the worst out there, Maxtor used to be a great HDD but went downhill as well. WD is the best choice and the 7200 rpm’s are the better speed choices, you can get great deals from tiger direct on most of the hard drives i got a 500 gig for 49.99 on sale the solid state drives are extremely fast but the pricing is out of the question for most folks they offer 2TB hdd but i am not sure of the price check them out.
The gparted part shouldn’t be to hard i think.
No, it’s not difficult at all, once you know what you are doing (or should do). Have a look at this thread: iowait slows system down post #17. There is an example how it looks.
I read a couple of times to set to the 4k sector size since if you don’t the performance takes a dip.
Not sure if that applies to all drives or just particular ones. I might have to check mine.
Just those with physical 4k sectors. All ordinary drives have (tiny) 512 bytes sectors. There is absolutely no alignment problem with those. But I still recommend that partitions align with whole tracks, except for the beginning of the first one.
Hardware in general has become flaky and unreliable. I think the hardware companies are floating on people thinking “its windows” or that its normal that things just don’t work right. “I must have got a virus” is a popular [mis]diagnosis. Thank Microsoft for creating an environment where bad hardware is the norm and people don’t know any better. Don’t take any guff from hardware vendors, be persistent and get your money’s worth.
Don’t expect you hardware to function correctly out of the box. You have to test it yourself. Hardware vendors won’t be bothered with or will be ineffective at it. Assume it’s broken out of the box and allow time in your plans for the RMA process.
Definitely when you get your hard drive make sure to write to every byte, run the SMART tests, and run a few performance tests. Do this before you put anything you care about on it.
(And FWIW I no longer sell Seagate drives to my customers. Two or three months is not the advertised MTBF. I don’t know what happened they used to be a good company.)
Well my drives are 512 bytes… so tiny. aehem…
But i plan to buy a 1,5TB drive in the future which i intend to use a my maindrive. My goal was to have only one drive for all my needs.
These larger drives need more attention i guess. I will be prepared