what is the most reliable harddrive?

i bought a hard drive about a year ago from tiger direct
i think it was a seagate
60 gig
it already has some bad sectors on it.
but ive not had any real horrible problems with it yet
ive decided to get another hard drive for more space
and i probably wont get the same make as the one i have now
for obvious reasons
(im not checking it now, dont want to bother unscrewing the case
and unplugging all the wires)

what is the most reliable 80 gig hard drive
with the least problems.
eg
noise, durability, bad sectors, etc
i dont want a repeat disaster of this hard drive i have now.
about 20megs of bad sectors.
dont know why it still works......

If it had bad sectors on it when you got it, you should have sent it straight back and got a replacement.

As for reliable drives, I got a pait of Matrox ATA66 drives still going strong after several years.

I'm going to be buying a Maxtor 80GB drive with 8MB cache for my next machine

I gather Western Digital also make decent drives, but I don't have any personal with any of their recent drives though.

i know this will get some in a twist..
but in the hundreds of thousands of operational hours i've had less failures with ibm than anything else

I suppose a big factor, is pure chance!

I for one have IBM Drives that have been running strong for years, but I also have a few that dies within weeks, and I still cannot get them RMA'd for one reason or another )

The one make that has served me well, without a shadow of a doubt, is most definitely Seagate... So much so, that I now run ONLY seagate drives, and so far, not a single bad sector... This is not a bad thing because I have quite a number of systems, all running 24/7 and the drives dont get a minutes rest.

I now sear by seagate as opposed to swearing at IBM.

a lot of people seem to dislike ibm hard drives
are they that unreliable?
not that id buy one
i also heard that some older maxtor drives have noise problems after a while
but besides that rumor, i hear theyre not bad.
so i guess that leaves western digital...
anybody got bad experience to share about it?

oh and for seagate, isnt there some seagate tool that im
supposed to use to format my drive?
i heard if you use stuff like that, windows wont be able to read it in dos
i know that from having a old 4.X gig on my last pc
that had to run a diag util to get past the 2 gig limit
i guess that was because of an old bios or something
oh well dont matter, sold it on ebay for 50$ lol
maybe im just thinking of the utility for the 2 gig problem
but i thought you had to use it anyway even if you didnt need it

whoops

:x

you know what i mean.... ;(
scandisk from a 98 boot disk

Maxtor's and Seagates always seem to be quite reliable. Right Now I has all Maxtor HDD's( an older D740x Series HDD an a newer Diamondmax Plus 8 Series HDD). The Plus 8 HDD stays cooler than the D740X HDD.

I have two Maxtor D740X's running 24x7 here, no problems... Seem like high quality drives.

right now, i can get a 80 gig 7200 western digital for 82$
free shipping
a 120 gig samsung is 110$, but i doubt i'll need it
the maxtor one is 10 or so$ more
and has same mb buffer
(does maxtor offer any better data fetching techniques?)
so if its not any better than wd...
besides my second 60 gig is a western digital
no problems whatsover
of course i formatted it with ntfs
and my other one is fat32
hmmm


can i set up raid with a wd 60 and wd 80 gig?
sounds interesting

my ata 133 card supports raid, i just dont know how to use it ;(

The only drive manufacturer that I have no dead drives of (yet) is maxtor
I have two 40 GB maxtors D540x Quite fast and silent, no probs

20GB WD200EB Even more silent than the maxtors, but had a few bad sectors, wich I fixed with a low level format, now working with no probs.

20GB WD205BA 7200rpm the loudest and the slowest, but no problems.

A friend of mine has a 60GB WD also no problems.

I also have a some fujitsus 8,4 and 4,2 GB Also no probs, but don't know how the new ones are.

I've seen a lot of dead IBM's a 10GB after 2 years, a 4 gb scsi and some smaller, but still have a 3,2 gb running loud as hell.

After you get a new drive you could low level format on the old drive, might get rid of those bad sectors

If you're planning to setup a raid, the ideal is if you have two equal drives. If you don't you can still use jbod.

So I'd go for a maxtor or a WD. Also look for what has the longest waranty

I have Seagate and WD in my home machine.

My work Dell has WD so I figure given that Dell give a next-day warranty they must be pretty confident in WD.

On the other hand, for the cynical amongst us, perhaps they give a next-day warranty if they're not confident in the hardware

sounds like i should low level format my seagate drive then,
how do i do that?

and whats jbod ;(

i suppose raid might work if i format the 80 gig to have a 60 gig partition
but im not too comfortable messing with stuff ive never tried before
ill probably ruin it.
also wouldnt the rpm difference screw with performance?
ack, dont think i really wanna make my drives into coasters

my western dig 60 gig drive is 5400 rpm, the 80 gig i want to buy
is 7200, is it that much louder?

ok heres what i have as option to buy

*80gb Maxtor 5400 RPM 9ms 2mb Buf White Label
$85.88
(why is there an asterix there?)
(what is white label?)

or

ORIGINAL WD 80GB 7200RPM ATA 100 EIDE WHITE LABEL 10 MONTHS WARRANTY
82$

(again what is white label?)

You can download a low level format utility from the manufacturers site. I don't know about seagate but try here http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/index.html
It's either DiscWizard or SeaTools. I one of these you should find something like a low lever format utility or write zeros to disk... probably in advanced oprtions. It'll wipe your disk clean so backup before you do that. You might also run any diagnostic tool inside seatools for any other errors.

Jbod is short for just a bunch of disks. If you have a raid controller this option enables you to use all available disk size.

If you setup raid 0 (striping) with a 60 and 80 GB drives you'll end up with a single 120GB drive 2x the smallest drive, but if you use jbod you'll have a 140GB (60+80) drive.

cool

im gonna try that then
wish me luck when i get my new disk
ps (can i mix-n-match diff rpm drives?)

Yes you can mix drives, that shouldn't be a problem.

From my experience, I've had 3 drives go bonkers on me - 2 Seagates (a 1 Gig and 1 2 Gig - each suddenly began developing and getting more bad sectors 1 year after purchase; which momentarily made me weary of Seagate), and a Quantum Fireball 20Gig (instantly died when one of its chips melted - I never trusted Quantum again, especially when the store that sold it to me advised me the same later on). Never had a Maxtor die on me, though the latest Maxtor I have (40Gig) did have strange read/write problems for awhile (Windows XP would bog down, then the drive would disappear, then it would go to PIO mode!) until I reformatted it (perhaps the problem was caused by the fact that its file system was NTFS converted on the fly from FAT32; later I reformatted it fresh into NTFS, it recorded the bad sectors, but basically has no read/write problems for now). My newest drive is a Seagate Barracuda 80G (which has taken over the function of the said Maxtor) - a nice thoroughbred drive that runs fast and well.