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I'd like your opinion about the best and most reliable HDDs.
I liked Quantum ones, but they seem they dropped the quality lately. On the other hand, Western Digital seems very reliable.
What about the speed and the RPM? I'm not sure if 7200RPM is good. I've RMAed two of them having bad clusters after a month of the purchase.
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God created human.
Human created computers.
God then got mad and created customers!!!!!
Hey AlienDyne,
Like you, I once thought that the Quantum drives were the only way to fly. The owner of the shop that I worked at back then bought Quantum Bigfoot Drives by the gross. All was well until we had about 35 2.5 giggers bite the dust in a 60 day period and head to RMA heaven. After that we bought Western Digitals, filling in with Maxtors whenever we had trouble getting the WD's. When I opened my own shop, I used Western Digital exclusivly with great success. Unfortunatly, Western Digital 10.2 gig drives have not been very reliable recently. I actually had 5 out 5 drives bad out of the box!!! So once again I find myself using Maxtor. Not my drive of preference, but for the time being they seem to be reliable.
In short, I think you have to roll with the punches. I personally "experiment" with different brands on a regular basis. That way you have a little product knowledge to fall back on when "your" product lets you down. Lets face it, almost all brands put out defective products from time to time. Thats the nature of this business.
Good luck and if you happen to find the perfect drive, let me know. I could use one right now!!!
WildTech
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I'd rather be lucky than smart!!
This may be slightly off canter, but where SCSI drives are concerned, I've only ever had one Seagate drive bite it. Of course, that one had such slight problems that we had a hard time diagnosing the thing for about three months before it finally went belly up. Still, I rarely if ever lose sleep over a Seagate drive I've installed. I don't think I've ever had problems with Seagate IDE drives either, but then I deal with those a lot less.
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R. Bret Walker, CNE
Every now and then I see a bad batch of hard drives.
I don't blame the manufacturers usually as many years ago I worked for UPS and saw how some things get shipped. Some folks take the drop part of drop ship literally.
I have a 3.2GB Quantum Fireball. For the last two years, it works perfectly.
When I bought a 13GB one, I found 55MB (!) of bad clusters after a month. And I don't "push" the drives so much! I use to defrag them twice a week. I've seen that problem lots of times with Quantum drives at work. They didn't have bad clusters at the first place, which indicates (in my opinion) a faulty part-construction.
Of course this could happen to all HDDs, but some of them are more faulty than others.
I was just wondering if Quantum dropped quality...
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God created human.
Human created computers.
God then got mad and created customers!!!!!
I just think it's cool how cheap HDDs have become. Remember when a 3Gig was $500?
Now you can get yourself a Seagate Barracuda 10Gig for about $105.
I too have seen my share of bad batches. WD got crappy for a little while but lately I have had few problems. You do have to play it by ear though. The shop I work for now uses Seagate U series drives and they seem to be OK.
On a seperate note, I recently Ghosted a U-66 drive to another (seperate channels, 2 U-66 cables, Ghost6) Took less than a minute to copy a Gig. The transfer topped out at 760 MB/S! That was sweet.
As for what I do with bad, out of warranty HDDs, just read my signature!
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I ripped the head assembly out - it spins up fine now...
You must not be at this too long. The first 200 MEG hard drive I purchased was $799 and I bought right when the 300 hit the market the same drive had been $900 just a month prior.Quote:
Originally posted by shawnMt:
I just think it's cool how cheap HDDs have become. Remember when a 3Gig was $500?
Now you can get yourself a Seagate Barracuda 10Gig for about $105.
The 200 Meg was plenty big enough to be a Netware (V2.05) server for 5 clients that had 32 meg local HDs.
When I was 16, I took my "car" money and bought an XT with a 10MB Hard drive...the hard drive alone cost over a grand! But I threw DOS 3.3, Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect on it...and still had TONS of room for documents. I thought I'd never fill it up! LOL
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R. Bret Walker, CNE