[TriLUG] OT: hard disk recommendation

[Ben Pitzer]

Aaron is right about WD drives 6-7 years ago.  Anything under 10GB 
failed miserably after short times.  Somewhere around the 14GB mark, 
they seemed to get something right, and I've now got two WD drives 
working magnificently in my home machines (which of course guarantees me 
a hard lockup from a broken spindle sometime before the weekend).

The 250GB drives these days...well, it's a bit of a gamble.  They 
haven't been out for long enough to say which ones work best.  Plus, 
it'll depend entirely on things like which production batch the drive 
comes from.  Given my difficulties of late with drives, including a 7 
year old 4.3GB Seagate drive locking up on me (/dev/hda in ironman, my 
server at home), I can't be emphatic enough in my recommendation of 
mirroring drives in some sort of software RAID setup.  Especially if 
it's an even marginally mission critical box.

Quantum, WD, Seagate and Maxtor are the top brands, so far as I've seen. 
  I haven't heard anything overly negative about any of them, but you 
may want to poke around on the community forums at Tom's Hardware or 
some other places of that ilk.

Good luck, and let us know what you hear.

Regards,
Ben Pitzer

Aaron S. Joyner wrote:
> Joseph Mack wrote:
> 
>> I'm looking for a 250GB EIDE 3.5" drive to last about 2yrs under light
>> service (single user machine where I do a lot of staring at the screen).
>>
>> I used to get Samsung, but they're topping out at 200G now. Before
>> that I used Quantum for years. I've been quite pleased with both 
>> suppliers.
>>
>> Anyone who I should/should not buy from?
>>
>> Thanks Joe
>>  
>>
> You might as well have asked, so - which do you prefer, vi or emacs?  
> :)  I've discovered that a fair portion of people have strong beliefs 
> about one vendor over another, but usually the sample size a single 
> individual has to work with is quite small.  I had really bad luck with 
> some Western Digital drives 6-7 years ago, and swore them off.  When I 
> got to Intrex, most of what they carried was Western Digital, and the 
> reason for it was simple - low cost, and not a lot of headaches with 
> RMAs.  On the semi rare time when they ordered Seagates (probably once 
> every month or three, usually one of the larger drives, or when they 
> first started carrying SATA), they would have a couple dozen come 
> through each store, and they'd sell like hotcakes because all the people 
> who like Seagate would pick one up.  It's a lot about personal 
> preference, but generally I find when you average out the quality over a 
> sufficiently large base of people, things even out pretty well.  There 
> are exceptions, of course, like the IBM DeathStar drives (google if 
> you're not familiar) - but those usually are not apparent until the 
> drive has been out in production for at least a year or more, usually 2 
> to 3.
> 
> So that's my two cents, buy what ever is on the cheap, and has at least 
> a 2yr warranty if that's the arbitrary time frame you're aiming for.
> Aaron S. Joyner