Hardware question - hard drives

[sinij]

I have K8N NeO Athlon 3000 PC and looking to get new hard drive, preferably SATA with high data transfer rate. Problem is that I don't know what nowday passes as a reliable product/brand. Anyone want to suggest anything or warn against anything? What is difference between SATA and upgraded SATA? What is good brand to buy?

[Strazos]

Brands: Western Digital, Maxtor, etc.....take a look at Anatech or Tom's....

[MrHat]

What's the sound output on a SATA drive?

[Shockeye]

I have a couple Seagate 7200.8 SATA drives that I'm happy with. They seem to run cooler and a bit quieter than some other drives.

Check anandtech.com and storagereview.com for breakdowns on drives.

[Trippy]

I have K8N NeO Athlon 3000 PC and looking to get new hard drive, preferably SATA with high data transfer rate.

If you want super-fast transfer rates the 10,000 RPM Raptor is still the only choice unless you want to go with a performance RAID setup. With the Raptor you pay *a lot* more per GB of storage, though. Otherwise for the 7200 RPM drives the drives that share the same platter density (the number of GBs you can fit on a single platter) the data transfer rate will all be about the same. The storagereview.com site Shockeye mentioned above has the best benchmarks if you really care about that sort of thing.

Problem is that I don't know what nowday passes as a reliable product/brand. Anyone want to suggest anything or warn against anything? What is difference between SATA and upgraded SATA? What is good brand to buy?

I don't think your motherboard supports any of the newer SATA technologies (NCQ, 3Gb/s interface speed, etc.) so unless you are thinking of upgrading your motherboard sometime in the near future you might not want to worry about those things. Most of the new SATA features are to make them more competitive performance and feature-wise to SCSI drives in a server-environment and don't really benefit the typical desktop user. The 3Gb/s interface can have a teensy-weensy performance benefit in single-drive mode (it's potentially a much bigger benefit in RAID-0 or other RAID performance mode) but again I don't think your MB supports it.

The top four brands -- Hitachi (formerly IBM), Maxtor,  Seagate, Western Digital -- are all roughly the same. For best performance look to Hitachi, Western Digital or Maxtor. Seagate has lagged in performance for a long time now. Seagate, though, has the best warranty at 5 years while all the other companies reduced the warranties on their IDE drives a while back. If you want a really quiet drive Samsung drives are the way to go with Seagate in second.

I personally avoid Hitachi drives out of principle because of the whole IBM "Deathstar" fiasco and the crappy way IBM treated their customers back then and Maxtor has been my brand of choice since that time (I was a die hard IBM HD customer since the days of their 1 GB SCSI "Pegasus" drives) and I haven't had any issues with any of my Maxtor drives. Western Digital used to be the performance king with their 8 MB cache Caviar SE drives but Maxtor and Hitachi have since caught up with them in performance. I didn't like the WDs at that time, even with their performance, since they weren't using Fluid Dynamic Bearings (FDB) so they were noisy as heck.

Edit: The Tech Report just did a review of some hard drives here:

http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q3/deskstar-7k500/index.x?pg=1

[OcellotJenkins]

I've been running Raptors in my rigs (both raid 0 and single drive) for a couple of years and I've been very pleased with the performance.  There is a noticable difference in the 10k rpm and 7.2k rpm in terms of load times for windows and most apps including games.  The only qualm I have with some of the Western Digital drives is that, over time, they can get a bit noisy... although I've not noticed the noise problem with my Raptors yet.

[Ironwood]

I've been running Raptors in my rigs (both raid 0 and single drive) for a couple of years and I've been very pleased with the performance.  There is a noticable difference in the 10k rpm and 7.2k rpm in terms of load times for windows and most apps including games.  The only qualm I have with some of the Western Digital drives is that, over time, they can get a bit noisy... although I've not noticed the noise problem with my Raptors yet.

And Hot.  Really, really fucking hot.

But I wouldn't swap em.

[Murgos]

I had to put mine into seperated drive bays because they got so hot they would shut down when installed in contiguous bays.  ~200 degress F I think...

[Sky]

I like the newer Seagates, the cat running their engineering department is the man. You might not get raptor transfer levels, but they're cool and quiet, as mentioned. That's important to my home theater setup.

I'd warn against Maxtors based on personal experience. I've had a couple of my own Maxtors die and several have died at work. I'm using Seagate until they start exhibiting a reason not to. I had a solid IBM Deskstar for years, just an iteration or two after the 'Deathstar', they weren't bad drives. WD has been pretty solid here at work, most macs have/had them. Well within normal failure rates (unlike Maxtor's).

[OcellotJenkins]

Heat really shouldn't be a problem these days with such cheap cooling solutions available.  Speaking of, I fucking hate NewEgg's new site layout.  Bring back NewEgg classic please.

[Murgos]

Heat really shouldn't be a problem these days with such cheap cooling solutions available.  Speaking of, I fucking hate NewEgg's new site layout.  Bring back NewEgg classic please.

Oh, I dunno.  Seperating them by about 1" of free air was pretty cheap.

[Sky]

Newegg classic ftw, no doubt. I almost wrote dizzout. Damn, I wrote it anyway. But yeah. I don't like the new layout much, either.

I know you didn't just recommend a dual jet engine cooling solution when the other component to 'cool' was 'quiet' ;)

I'm all about as few fans as possible without resorting to liquid cooling. GPU aside, the smallest fan in my case is 90mm, and that's just because I was too lazy to put in a 120mm over the CPU (would've had to go buy one).

I'm getting old and quiet > performance these days...

[OcellotJenkins]

I know you didn't just recommend a dual jet engine cooling solution when the other component to 'cool' was 'quiet' ;)

I'm all about as few fans as possible without resorting to liquid cooling. GPU aside, the smallest fan in my case is 90mm, and that's just because I was too lazy to put in a 120mm over the CPU (would've had to go buy one).

I'm getting old and quiet > performance these days...

Heh, well my gaming machines don't have any hard drive coolers in them and the raptors haven't produced enough heat to cause a problem yet.  The reason I linked the cooler was because I put 4 of them in a server at work recently and I was impressed with the form factor, cooling, and price of them.  They are mounted to four WD 250GB sata drives (7200rpm) in an aluminum Lian Li case and believe it or not, I can't hear the noise over the air conditioning unit in my office.  A home theater PC would be a different story though... I'd probably keep the fans to a minimum in that scenario as well.  120mm case fans and Zalmon flower CPU coolers for teh win.

Edit:  Speaking of noise and fans, you'd be surprised at how quiet Panaflow fans are compaired to any other type of fan out there.  You can get them in all sizes and they make nice replacements for video card fans and such.  A little tip I picked up over at silentpcreview.com.

[HaemishM]

I bought an 80GB Hitachi from Newegg about 6 months ago. It's pretty quiet, installed easily, and I haven't had a lick of trouble with the drive. I love me some SATA interfaces, btw. Beats the shit out of IDE ribbon cables, which I swear are made of the devil's intestines. I can't say the performance would blow you away, but it ain't slow either.

[Yegolev]

It's all about the cables.

[sinij]

Thank for suggestions, it was very informative and helped me make up my mind. I decided to go with two Raptors. Since I have raid built-in into my mb I might as well use it.

[Sky]

Edit:  Speaking of noise and fans, you'd be surprised at how quiet Panaflow fans are compaired to any other type of fan out there.

That's the brand I use.

[Fabricated]

This kind of stuff is my field.

My experience with the following brands:

Maxtor: Generally reliable, but a bit on the slow side for some reason if you get their 7200 RPM models. Tends to get noisy and clicky in my experience after about 4-6 months of operation. Other than that, they run cool and are about the cheapest drive of reasonable quality you can get.

Seagate: Overpriced, and generally hit or miss in quality. They make some damn good drives, just make sure you read reviews and customer reviews to see which ones are the duds. I shy away from these since Seagate had a HUGE run of bad drives years ago.

Hitachi Deskstar: The deskstar line was god until the "Deathstar" run of drives IBM put out nearly ruined their reputation. I had one of the bad models, and had to replace it no less than 5 times over the course of 1 year. The new Hitachi-made drives however are very, very good. A bit higher priced, but I'd recommend them if you have the scratch to blow on their high-end models.

Western Digital: No complaints here. I run a WD and a Maxtor in my current box, and a WD in the 'rents' box. Runs a bit hotter, but I haven't noticed any noise increases. I've never had a problem with WD drives, and they tend to be quite fast across the board. Recommended.

[Morfiend]

I have 2 Raptors in a RAID 0, and I really noticed the performance jump. My system boots in about 10-12 seconds to windows xp pro. I have them pretty close together, but I have had no problems with heat so far.