Which Hard-Drive brand should I buy?

See if you can find this drive at a store you can buy from:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148274

Hope that helps.

I decided over 15 years ago to use WD exclusively and I've never been sorry.

Both WD and Seagate make very good drives. I chose that one because it was the highest-scoring 1TB drive on several benchmarks, and because I've read very good reviews on it.

I would Recommend WD, best alround performance, the bad thing is that they do not have the biggest hd on the market.

WD are good performing drives but i can't really say much sense i never had a HDD fail on me in my life and i had mostly maxtor and WD hard drives

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

I currently have a WD IDE (400GB), and a Maxtor SATA (500GB).

It's obvious which performs better... but then again, much different technologies!

Panarchy

PS: Perhaps I should just go for Seagate, so I can say I'm 'testing' different brands!

Got some more info;

After completing a polless poll, I came up with the following results;

4 - Hitachi
13 - Western Digital
11 - Seagate

Winner: Western Digital

So I'll be getting Western Digital now.

Probably two separate 500GB ones in RAID 0 (as per Arne's suggestion).

Thanks for all suggestions,

Panarchy

go with WD's 640gb drives, they are MUCH faster
you wont be disappointed with those, i promise

Agreed

How much faster?

Also, I'd end up with 1.24TB instead of 1TB.

1TB is more than enough for me.... also I have 900GB of other hard-disk space spread out over 2 hard-drives (IDE - 400GB and SATA - 500GB).

Panarchy

How would two of these disks look?

http://www.netplus.com.au/products-detail.asp?pcode=HDW...

I found out that 640GB Hard-Drives are both faster and cheaper than the 500GB ones (at least for WesternDigital)

Please tell me what you think...

Thanks in advance,

Panarchy

If they're cheaper than the 500gb HD's, I'd get them. It's always better to have too much hard drive space than too little.

^Just checked, seems to be $8 more expensive...

I'll end up having to much either way  

The main reason I'm getting them is cause they're faster  

IMO they're worth the extra money.

rGHH

Also got recommended Samsung by my teacher... so I guess I have to go with Samsung.

Panarchy

I've never had good experience with samsung hard drives, but maybe that's just me.

I have experienced HDD failure on many occasions - may be unlucky, maybe have too many  

WD have excellent customer service and fast replacement polices (i.e will ship before they recieve)

Maxtor - well they're policies may as well be written on toilet paper  

Thanks...

Ah I've got another question, what exactly will RAID 0 do for me?

Because I have found that the cheap 500GB are 16MB Cache, yet the cheap 1TB are 32MB Cache.

And if all RAID 0 does is double the cache... well you understand what I am asking.

Is that what RAID 0 does? To make it (almost) double the speed?

Panarchy

PS: The 1TB are a little cheaper than 2 500GB. About $11 difference in price...

Raid 0 doesn't just double the cache. It stripes the data across two different drives, so it can have higher transfer speeds. It usually doesn't have a 100% speed increase, but if you have a good sata controller it can be close to double.

Hmm...

So would I be better off with the 2 500GB in RAID0 or the 1 1TB one?

($11 cheaper to get the 1TB one!)

See performance for single drives. Not sure how RAID fits in though.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/3-5-hard-drive-chart...
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/3-5-hard-drive-chart...

For performance, Seagate is a clear winner. WD drives, other than the small capacity velociraptors, don't stand a chance. WD drives are more about reliability and costumer care than speed.

IMO it depends on your motherboard. Raid on most intel motherboards is very good, and a lot better than a single drive. On the other hand, raid on my board (780i) sucks, and it would be better to get a single, larger drive.

Hello

My motherboard is an Asus P5K-E WiFi

Panarchy

WD's are quieter than seagates though i think ^^

Haven't ever had a issue with a WD, first and only brand that I'll ever use.

the thing with RAID 0 is the odds of loosing data to disk failure will go up.

In a raid 0 if any one of the HDD's fail you will loose all your data. any data left one the working hard drive would be useless

ive had issues with maxtor and seagate so now i only run wd.

is two 1tb out of the question? run as raid 1 and let them mirror rather than one big drive.

that would be good for a failsafe feature. there is only a small performance hit with RAID 1 because of writing to 2 disks at the same time

Just wondering, why would you want to set up RAID arrays ?

I am using 2 80 GB HDDs, one SATS, one IDE and I think they run fine, no sound , quite much speed.

There are really only two kinds of hard drives-
the ones that have already failed and the ones that are going to fail in the future.

The quality and reliability of most of the brands goes up and down with time. I've seen LOTS of failed drives over the years. All of the brands that have had best reliability are gone now- couldn't compete with their higher quality. (Control Data, Micropolis, IBM, Fujitsu, etc.) Seagate used to be one of the lower quality brands, then they bought control data and that brought their quality up. Maxtor has always been better than average. IBM was good then they sold to Hitachi and their quality went downhill a little. Samsung is a relative newcomer. WesternDigital has always been pretty good.