Hard drive recommendations?
 

Well, after having some hard drive problems, BIOS is finally telling me that the drive's S.M.A.R.T. status is bad. In other words, time for me to replace the hard drive.

Any recommendations out there on which hard drive manufacturers to go for and which ones to avoid?

Thanks!

It has been my experience over the last couple of years that *all* hard drives suck equally. Since QC is a barrier to lower pricing, and since gigs per dollar is virtually the *only* factor that consumers consider when buying storage, there is apparently little to no QC being exercised on product being shoved out the door. So buy the most storage for the least amount of cash, and pray.

On a related note, does anyone else find that floppies are about unusable these days, even right out of the box? I throw away about 1/3 to 1/2 of floppies I try to use anymore because they are flat nonfunctional.

In my experiece Western Digital drives hold out very well. Maxtor drives are less expensive but I've seen them fail often. More modern drives with fluid ball bearing moters are generally more reliable and much quieter.

On another note, stay away from IBM brand hard drives for the time being. Long story short one of their more popular models sucks and they tried to cover it up. More on this can be found here

Thats an interesting problem. Where I work we send and recieve tons of data in floppy disk format (many computers don't have CD-R drives). We generally only throw out one or two in a box of fifty.

IBM had a huge fiasco with thier high end drives (BTW those IBM drives = WD drives). At the time WD didn't label the high end drives as WD.

Basicaly the expensive 7.2krpm 2-8mb cache models would overheat and in 6month -1.5 years the motor would die. The place I worked exclusivley used IBM drives for the RAIDs; we had cases where 10 drives would die daily. IBM replaced them all (many out of warranty) but the repalcments would also die. Eventualy we switched to Seagate.

Since then IBM has stopped using WD components in their drives and now is partnered with Hitachi. Hitachi is very well known and respected for making high availability disk farms and the like. In other words, they 'should' be very very reliable.

In other words you should not be so afraid of IBM drives today. But IBM has ruined their relationship with many customers by denying that IBM drives had any reliability issues for years and trying to cover it up.

But yes, do make sure to get Fluid Dynamic Bearing motor.

Oh and if you want SCSI like performance without the price, get a SATA Raptor. (Yes they're still expensive as hell)

Anyone know what exactly Maxtor's "MaxBlast" does, and if there's any reason to use it instead of an OS's own formatting software?

Any recommendations out there on which hard drive manufacturers to go for and which ones to avoid?

I've had better luck with WD, but I tend to think they all kind of suck since everyone is on a "big drive for cheap" kick right now. Since they are so cheap, though, I've taken to not purchasing the biggest drive I can afford and picking up two equally sized drives, instead. I throw one in the PC and the other in an external, firewire case. Every week I flip on the external, run a backup to it, then switch it off. I figure that with the current quality of drives that is better to have a good backup than more space.

And speaking of media quality, I've found that backing up to CD-Rs is a bad idea right now. None of mine have lasted over three months -- they all suffer from "CD rot".

I like to avoid the manufacturer's custom bios thingy. (You can have trouble later sometimes if you're moving things around.) Generally the most compelling reason to use the special bios is when you're dealing with a disk bigger than the computer's bios can handle, and that's becoming a less and less common problem.

Kitsune, try the Verbatim CD-Rs. They serve me well. They have a special protective coating on the top layer that seems to prevent the flaking or the discoulration I have seen in cheaper disks.

Up until a few years ago, I replaced more Maxtor drives than any other. That being said, once Maxtor acquired Quantum their quality went way up. I have used Maxtor for a few years now with good results.

Also, if you are using 2k or XP you shouldn't need anything other than your "Computer Management" tools to handle your drives.

Maxblast creates an extended partition that includes code to make primary partition and extended partition appear to computer as same. That is the easy part. The hard part is why MaxBlast software is so difficult to remove. If not removed by the correct type of MaxBlast, then sometimes a Maxtor drive appears to be broken. Eventually the drive can be recovered. But even some of the Maxtor software crashes trying to remove the MaxBlast.

Maxtor diagnostic software appears to be less reliable than it once was. Once had to download an older copy from Russia (of all places) in order to solve what appeared to be a defective Maxtor drive (because I did not use MaxBlast to remove the MaxBlast software).

The long version of why it is better to not use those BIOS extension softwares - if you can avoid them.

Have had two Maxtor drives eventually fail. Both failures were due to transistor failure - not due to drive mechanical failure.