new hdd help

[banger298]

which is best a Western Digital or a Maxtor each one with 8mb Cache,
i hear confliting storie about both make (will be looking at 80gb plus on both drives ) help me make the right chose .
thanks

[808smokey]

Personally I like maxtor. But many will say they prefer WD or seagate or IBM. I like Maxtor for the Formating utility. You can be a total idiot, no offense, and still set it up correctly. Also there Warranty program is by the Best IMO. Buy what you like and suites your needs

[jeex]

i've got a couple of 80gb seagates, they've been churning and burning for 2 years now without any problems.. i used to buy western digital all the time before that.. when i had any problems, WD was really good about replacing them.

[gmatov]

They're all good drives, today. They're commodities. No difference except one will go to 8 MB cche, everybody follows suit.

They're all within a millisecond or so in seek and access time.

Most have dropped to a one year warranty.All but Seagate have gone to ATA 133, they're still ATA 100.

I have had all replaced under warranty, none has asked me for a dated proof of purchase as the drives are stamped, either with a date of mfg, or a warranty expires date..

Buy what is on sale the week you really need one, or decide now is the time to put one in stock.

I would never, ever, use the disk that comes with a drive to install it. It will set up parameters that a regular BIOS cannot read, the program must stay resident for the drive to be useable. Move it to another machine, it will hiccup, what the hell is this.

I use fdisk/format, and you really should learn this, it is basic. Go ahead and use the XP disk management tools after you have all set up as you need, but at least learn this little bit about computers..

Personally, I. at this time have Max, WD, Samsung, as internals, the Samsung is the only internal drive I have ever bought that was in FAT32 when installed, instantly accessible, and the WD external 120 gig USB, which also is , apparently formatted FAT32.

Cheers,

George

[redwudz]

I think george has it right, not a lot of difference between drives. Go for a good warranty/exchange. All drives die eventually. Never put anything on them that you can't afford to lose. I've tried Maxtors, Seagate, and most of the others. You get a good drive, you get a bad drive. Luck of the draw. I have have good luck with Maxtor for exchange, had a few failed drives, replacement within a week or two. A good backup proceedure is more important than the drive manufacturer. If you use RAID 0 you will generally learn this pretty quick. My RAID has failed several times in the last few years. Not a problem, anything lost is easily recovered.

[Cobra]

I use both Maxtor and WD drives, there's very little difference between them. WD are quiet drives, Maxtors are a little more noisy.

I prefer WD drives, although I do not have one. Just built several PCs with them, and they're rock solid.

Cobra

[808smokey]

I use fdisk/format, and you really should learn this, it is basic.

That's fine and dandy but why in stall XP on FAT32? Waste of time if you ask me

[Jayhawk]

I'm using Seagate, WD, and Maxtor in my three machines and all seem fine. I do like the 8M cache and find it helps with large file transfers. Had very bad luck with IBM Deskstars.

If it came down to WD or Maxtor, I'd buy what's on sale. If the price was the same, I'd probably go with ATA133 over ATA100. If that were the same, I'd flip a coin or go with the best looking box.

[gmatov]

Smoke,

I wouldn't install to FAT32, but I would fdisk, format with a boot disk, then allow XP (or W2k ) to convert partition to NTFS.

My comment was to not use the disk utility proprietary to a given drive, the parameters are not the same as you may find if you do so.

I lost a WD drive that way one time, tried to slave it to another machine, couldn't see it, WD tech told me send it back, I would not be able to see it unless I installed EZDrive to that machine also. Negatory, pal. Never used the disk utils since.

Cheers,

George

[808smokey]

Smoke,

I wouldn't install to FAT32, but I would fdisk, format with a boot disk, then allow XP (or W2k ) to convert partition to NTFS.

OK, That makes sense I've done that before.

My comment was to not use the disk utility proprietary to a given drive, the parameters are not the same as you may find if you do so.

What about when the disk is 200gig. FDISK won't read that size.

I lost a WD drive that way one time, tried to slave it to another machine, couldn't see it, WD tech told me send it back, I would not be able to see it unless I installed EZDrive to that machine also.

That sux you had that happened but I doubt it had anything with the format utility. Your drive was probably just dead. I've formatted WD drives with the disk program, used for 6 months as OS drive then slicked it with Maxtor format disk. But before I did that I slaved it to another drive (seagate) to get my info off that I needed and had no problems. I'm not trying to argue or anything but from my experiences I've never had any problems. I had a Maxtor 40gig work great for 1 month and then it started "ticking" then died a few minutes later. The read/write head fell off the arm in the HD, destroyed the disk completely, but I got a replacement one, that was 4 years ago and it's still my OS drive for my XP box.

[Ripper2860]

I work for a disk storage subsystems MFG that builds SCSI, PATA and SATA based RAID systems and NAS servers (up to 64TB). In the past we have used Maxtor for IDE-based systems and for the past year have used WD exclusively. Reliability and performance was a factor in our decision.

The WD-JB series PATA and SATA have proven to be VERY reliable and even though WD never went to ATA-133 in the PATA line (ATA100 only) -- performance was indistinguishable from 133 when configured in our RAID subsystems. The SATA JB series (8MB cache) and WD Raptors (10,000 RPM) have proven to be excellent drives !!

** Note: Wish the Raptors were a little cheaper and higher capacity -- but all good thing come to those that wait !! **

[gmatov]

Smoke,

Ah, but when you DL Large Disk Update and create a new boot disk, it will see and operate on 160 gig drives, my largest to date.

The original 98 fdisk utility had a limit that would deduct 64 gigs from anything over that, an 80 would format to 16 gigs, etc..

The new one has a glitch of its own, 5 digit DOS display, my 120 gig, 117 actual, showed in fdisk as 17000MB. I reran the zip to make another bootdisk, thinking I screwed up somewhere, finally said go ahead, when it got to under 100 gig, it showed, for instance, 97000 MB to partition left.

No, the drive was not dead. It was just unreadable. As I said, if I installed the disk utility to the other machine, as the tech said, I "might " have been able to read it, but will not use any of them again.

Since you do seem to rely on MaxBlast and Data Life Guard, and the like, you, of course, would have been able to get your data off, so long as the disk would work at all.

I don't know why, either, noone seems to like S.M.A.R.T. for their computers. The manual for every one of my MoBos warns of a small hit to performance, but I will pay that for the advance warning that a disk is failing, back up and replace, which I have had, and took back to the vendor, who put it in a shop machine, came out shaking his head, muttering that "Smart says it is no good, I never saw that before".

Gave me a replacement on the spot, no argument.

Cheers,

George