Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt,uk.comp.homebuilt,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (
More info?)
"Mike Tomlinson" <mike@NOSPAM.jasper.org.uk> wrote in message news:MWPQhsCIsQ3BFwGA@jasper.org.uk
> In article <crgsrr$1sh$1@news7.svr.pol.co.uk>, Fred Finisterre <finisterre@gmail.com> writes
> > > Not Maxtor are they?
> > >
> > I *have* had a lot of problems with Maxtors. Why do you say that?
>
> I have had personal experience of a very high failure rate of Maxtors at
> work, and anecdotal evidence from usenet suggests that I am not the only
> one.
>
> All drive makers will produce turkeys from time to time, so there's no
> point in saying "always buy brand X." The best choice *currently* seems
> to be Seagate, and their 5 year warranty gives more confidence. I have
> two Seagates - an 80gb Barra IV PATA and a 160gb Barra 7200.7 SATA.
>
> John Clarke's comments about the 120mm fan for the drive bays in the
> case you've chosen are useful (I didn't look up the case to see its
> features), though you should still monitor the drives' SMART
> temperatures and consider moving, say, two into other bays
> if they do run hot if installed as a stack.
>
> The good thing about them being SATA drives is that the cabling in
> point-to-point so your choice of drive placement is not restricted by
> needing to put two on the same cable.
>
> If heat is a concern, and you plan to run the drives in RAID, consider
> buying 5400rpm drives instead of 7200rpm. The slower rotational
> speed will mean they'll run cooler,
> and RAIDing them will compensate for the slightly lower performance.
Nonsense, no form of (striped) RAID will compensate for the bigger
latency of a 5400RPM drive vs that of a 7200RPM drive.
And whether a 5400 rpm drive will run cooler than a 7200 rpm drive
also depends on the number of platters used in the drive, quality of
bearings, spindle motor efficiency and maybe acoustic management.
> If the machine is a network server, the
> bottleneck is more likely to be your NIC than your drives.