Best bullet-proof drive?

Soldato
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Looking for a 200GB ATA100 drive for an old 1.2GHz Duron machine that I'm turning into a media/network backup. I'm looking for something very reliable (rather than just fast) as the missus will be using it to backup her Photoshop work onto. At the moment I have a Western Digital Caviar SE 200GB ear-marked, as it's actually the cheapest 200GB at my supplier. But I'm willing to spend a bit more if there's a more robust drive. Any recommendations?

Cheers :)
 
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Cyber-Mav said:
WD any raid edition drive or a raptor.

you after IDE or SATA or SCSI?
The RAID editions are usually too large, raptors are too expensive and is probably out of the price range, however these are viable options for anyone else.
 
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Hmm, Seagate are usually my first choice but I'd heard good things about the WD Caviars and the price was nice. Think I'll take another look at the Seagates tho.

A Raptor wouldn't make sense for what I'll be using it for - I want something big and good value thanks :) They're also a bit too noisy and I want this machine to be as quiet as possible.

Thanks for all the suggestions anyway. Out of interest, any brands I should stay clear of in terms of reliability?

EDIT: It's got to be ATA100 as that's all the KT7A mobo supports and I want to keep it simple :)
 
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I'm going to be berated for this, but you guessed it - Maxtor. Yeah, their drives are OK, but that's it, just OK. I'd be looking at Seagate, Hitachi and WD in that order.
 
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Another one for Seagate... Looks like there is simply no arguement on that score, and after having one Seagate fail on me ever, and thats only because it fell out of my pocket on a bike @ 55mph, and even then, I am still using the first 5GB of it for a C: that to me, says everything!

I got tons of WD and Maxtor drives here that are dead or messed up in one way or another, but Seagate.... Flawless.
 
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Curio said:
EDIT: It's got to be ATA100 as that's all the KT7A mobo supports and I want to keep it simple :)

If a hard drive is ATA133 don't discount it. It will still work on your motherboard.

How about maybe looking into a RAID1 array. Shouldn't be that much more and maybe sacrifice size for reliability.
 
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Another vote against Maxtor!

Never had a problem with Samsung Spinpoints (ultra quiet as well), Western Digital or even IBM/Hitachi.
 
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If its important, its all very good having a seagate with its swanky 5 year warranty (I have 4 * 400GB's at present) but if the drive fails, which is still can do that warranty ISNT going to get all your wifes stuff back. Your best bet is two cheaper/smaller drives and RAID1, or like myself get 4 and RAID5 the babies.
 
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RAID5 controllers can be expensive - a person with a bog standard controller might be able to do a RAID0+1 though... or just simple RAID1.

And the warranty does indicate a greater longevity of life. The seagates are still less likely to fail soon which is why you should choose it - every drive will fail at one point or another, just seagates seem to last the longest.
 
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smids said:
RAID5 controllers can be expensive - a person with a bog standard controller might be able to do a RAID0+1 though... or just simple RAID1.

And the warranty does indicate a greater longevity of life. The seagates are still less likely to fail soon which is why you should choose it - every drive will fail at one point or another, just seagates seem to last the longest.

Yeah on average they might last longer, its not something you should bet on though.

RAID5 can be done very much on the cheap. I have a RocketRaid1540 SATA card that i flashed so it is able to mount RAID5 arrays. But i don't even use that now, my best advice is grab an old system bundle in some cheap PATA/SATA controller cards (they dont even have to be specific RAID cards). Then either use windows, or your favourite linux distro and get software RAID5 working. I'm still working on the linux side of things but everything is going well :).

If you really cant afford to lose something make sure you back up and have redundancy. Simply saying these drives last the longest is not enough, there are loads of drive that die a few weeks after being used, and its independant of make, it still happens.
 
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Actually, multiple HDs is somethign that I have said for years.

My main box has 6.

C: is 8GB of a Raptor with T: as the rest, D: is a 120GB Seagate SATA, E: are a Striped pair of Seagate 320GB Drives, and F: is a striped pair of Maxtor 40GBs

My others have only 2 drives

C: and E: are on one drive, and D: and F: are on the other

With the exception of my WinXP64 Box, and thats currently piddling about with weird RAID setups, having 4xMaxtor 40GB Raid 0+1

Having one large HD and trusting it with so much data, is as close to thick as you can get.

Some argue, that they keep regular backups, but there are 2 thigns that come tomy head on this.

1 - How the bloody hell can you afford to back up close to 400GB of data
2 - If you do have backups of all of that, then you dont actually need 400GB do you?

I myself do indeed have utterly stupid ammounts of HD storage, however, a lot of that is work related, the rest is simply a copy of every system tools, and driver I have for all my PCs, plus any other PC that I come into contact with, also I need extra space for when I need to back up any HDs data, but for home use, do I need it?

No, a 5 year guarantee does give that little bit more peace of mind. There is no doubt that a high quality HD may very fail sooner than expected, and also a poor quality HD might outlive your expectancy too, sometimes its the luck of the draw, but statistically, Seagates will outlive all the other makes.

You make your choice.
 
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FatRakoon said:
<snip>

No, a 5 year guarantee does give that little bit more peace of mind. There is no doubt that a high quality HD may very fail sooner than expected, and also a poor quality HD might outlive your expectancy too, sometimes its the luck of the draw, but statistically, Seagates will outlive all the other makes.

You make your choice.
Couldn't have put it better.

I know exactly what you are saying LeperousDust - I personally have a 4x80GB Hitachi SATA-II RAID0+1 array being constructed, with my 250GB seagate storage drive to go into a RAID1.

I know the importance of backups etc but some people just cannot afford the cost of a RAID array in terms of 'wasted' disks which are the redundant ones. In this case, you just have to go by statistics - there is nothing else you can rely on.
 
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Thanks for the replies guys.

Basically, RAID is definitely something I'll be doing at a later date. When she has graduated I'm hoping to build her a nice work station with a proper storage solution. Until then I'm just looking for something bog-standard, cheap and reliable. She does backup onto DVD/CD as well (when I bug her enough about it :) ) so I'm not too worried about losing anything.

I'm starting to lean towards the Seagates now.....which was my initial gut feeling :)
 
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Curio said:
Looking for a 200GB ATA100 drive for an old 1.2GHz Duron machine that I'm turning into a media/network backup. I'm looking for something very reliable (rather than just fast) as the missus will be using it to backup her Photoshop work onto. At the moment I have a Western Digital Caviar SE 200GB ear-marked, as it's actually the cheapest 200GB at my supplier. But I'm willing to spend a bit more if there's a more robust drive. Any recommendations?

Cheers :)

Bullet-proof eh? all i can imagine are the men in white suits in the fabs shooting the hell out of some HDD. Frankly though id love to shoot my maxtor at this current time. Its giving me all sorts of probs.
 
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a 5 year warranty may be useless if you loose all your data but it also says seagate have a lot more faith in there drives than other manufacturers.

personally i just use an external HDD with true image, the chances of both my drives going at once are slim
 
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