High-End, High-Capacity SATA-150 Roundup 234
Maxtorn writes This review is published to cover a "300GB Maxtor drive, but provides a roundup covering a few high end, high capacity drives from Maxtor, Seagate, and Hitachi. Synthetic / real world performance, thermal results, and noise output are all covered on drives ranging from 200-500GB in capacity and with 8-16MB of cache memory. A solid reference for those shopping for a new drive."
SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now I like a drive I can use in more than way. I can use this on my current ATA aetup, and if I upgrade motherboards, I can just switch cables and move on.
Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:3, Informative)
The entire time I was wondering what those new-fangled connectors coming o
Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:2)
Now, could somebody explain why the hell they made a new power connector?
Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:2)
Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:2)
Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:3, Funny)
Oh no, I do recall once doing some work on one of my older computers, and I did remove my CD-RW drive with the power on. It sparked, the system shut down, and my drive was dead, but i definitely "hot swapped" it.
Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:2)
Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:2)
Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:2)
Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:2)
Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:2)
Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:2)
Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:3, Funny)
I think the drive probably tastes the same, regardless of connector, though the SATA drive might taste better because the connector doesn't try poking holes in the toungue.
Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133? (Score:2)
The review isn't clear, but does this drive have both interfaces, or is it available in two flavours?
The impression I got is that it is available in two flavours. The reson I got this impression is that if you look at the closeup photo showing the connection end of the drive (on page 2, IIRC), you will see that it has SATA, but no PATA connections. It's right around the paragraph about the traditional power connector still being there.
A look at the review summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Pros:
Cons:
Re:A look at the review summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Drives will die, eventually. Design decisions can affect the shape of the death curve, and how much you spend in QA can affect the number that will die within the first $X months.
A warranty provides a (strong) financial incentive for the manufacturer to make sure that very, very few die in that first few years. With a one year warranty there's no incentive to push the death curve out much beyond 18 months.
That doesn't mean that a short warrantied drive will die quickly, but it's likely that a drive with a longer warranty has had more attention paid to expected lifespan.
Re:A look at the review summary (Score:2)
Anyway my point i
Reliability (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A look at the review summary (Score:2)
To restate his point (which there is some truth in):
A manufacturer who chooses to warrant the drives for a long period of time probably makes 'better' drives in MTBF and expected lifespan; they have more of a financial incentive to do so than a manufacturer who does not have a long warranty. Therefore, if
Re:A look at the review summary (Score:2)
Re:A look at the review summary (Score:2)
I think customers who have RAID or big investments in IT would want to claim that warranty because it does add up.
And to say of a loss in reputation, can anyone say IBM/Deathstar [ibmdesksta...gation.com]?
Re:A look at the review summary (Score:2)
Really, what good is a warranty, other than it's DOA? Does anyone do backups anymore? How's that MTBF? A warranty is the least of my concerns if my drive dies in the first year.
A high MTBF is fine and dandy, but only an estimate. The length of the warranty, on the other hand, is the drive manufacturer putting their money where their mouth is. I consider a longer warranty to indicate that a company is more willing to take a risk on their drive than a company issuing a shorter warranty.
Re:A look at the review summary (Score:2)
Really, what good is a warranty, other than it's DOA? Does anyone do backups anymore? How's that MTBF? A warranty is the least of my concerns if my drive dies in the first year.
Seagate drives carry a 5 year warranty. I'm willing to bet those drives are better assembled than the 1-year warranty crap that's currently being shipped out.
(Yes, I had a 300gb Maxtor drive die on me in 14 months)
Re:A look at the review summary (Score:2)
Seagate, on the other hand, I don't remember ever having to return one of their drives. I remember the
Re:A look at the review summary (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, could be...
Could also be a betting game.
How many drives, if they had a 10 year warrantee do you think would actually make it back on a warrantee return
Could be Seagate knows and just tossed that out there. I mean, geez who's still buying 40 GB drives and those were only a couple years ago, right? Pe
Re:A look at the review summary (Score:2)
Drives are stamped with manufacture date. I haven't had to produce any receipts to get broken drives exchanged for new.
If there's a company that does require the reciept, I'd like to hear about it so I can avoid them like the plague.
To me a hard drive is the one computer component I *do* want a good warranty on, beca
Re:A look at the review summary (Score:2)
MTBF? Maxtor? Ha! (Score:2)
Buy Seagate! (Score:5, Informative)
And if you see Maxtor, run like the wind!
Re:Buy Seagate! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Buy Seagate! (Score:2)
Re:Buy Seagate! (Score:2)
Re:Buy Seagate! (Score:2)
I never got an issue with Quantum fireballs, though a bigfoot broked.
Re:Buy Seagate! (Score:2)
You can't really blame Maxtor, though their drives do tend to produce quite a bit of heat. Most manufacturers state very clearly on their websites that you should not al
Re:Buy Seagate! (Score:2)
I do tend to abuse (as in usage, but not in physical means) HDs alot, and I've burn out more Deathstars(IDE) and Cheetahs(SCSI) then anyone I can remember. and I've seen my fair share of dead Seagates and WDs too.
from my experience talking to people dealing about dea
Re:Buy Seagate! (Score:2)
I've had the exact opposite experience as you. All my WD drives from the past 10 years (including the 200MB one!) are still spinning in machines right now, while Maxtor drives tend to die on me within the first 6-12 months of operation.
Changes (Score:2)
Recently my company got me a dell XPS Gen 3 with three Maxtor 160gb hard drives (two in a RAID 1 array). Just a few months after I got it, both drives failed, the ones in the RAID 1 mirror. That blew, though I was able to recover data from one of the drives. I also just recently had one of my external 2
Re:Changes (Score:2)
Re:Changes (Score:2)
Maxtor had a good run from around 500MB-100GB in storage space; many of the drives produced during that period were excellent, and much of the goodwill people have for the brand is based on that period. Somewhere around 200GB, their designs changed enough that the Maxtor drives stopped being even slightly reliable. This was also the same time
Re:Buy Seagate! (Score:2)
</aol>
My Maxtor just died recently (Score:2, Funny)
This is the first harddrive that has ever died on me in 15+ years of owning my own personal computer(s).
Does anyone know anything about resurrecting data from a dead Maxtor? Seriously!
Because I really don't want to spend all of that time re-ripping all of my CDs to OGGs again. And it's not just music that I lost: all of my backups of software apps, games, programming pro
Re:My Maxtor just died recently (Score:2)
Re:My Maxtor just died recently (Score:3, Informative)
Very much depends on how it died...
Did the controller roast? Try swapping it for another from the same exact model (and batch, if possible)... Only viable when the data has a value greater than the cost of a throw-away drive, but it works (Or at least it used to... Not sure how newer drives would work, since they keep track of bad spots on the disk and automatically avoid them).
Does it not spin up? Drive bearings seem l
How times change (Score:2)
Western Digital (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.wdc.com/en/company/releases/PressRelea
Re:Buy Seagate! (Score:2)
And if you see Maxtor, run like the wind!
I can see buying seagate... esp ones with a 5 or 7 year warranty. Going mailorder it's a very decent option.
But that 1 year warranty isn't exclusive to Western Digital... I just bought a 200gig Maxtor Drive and it only has a 1 year warranty, but the price was $80. I could
Re:Buy Seagate! (Score:2)
I've heard they've gotten better, but I'm still a bit leary. Only worse drives I've seen was the IBM 75GXP (I had to RMA 5 drives before getting a good one).
I've got a 17GB Seagate that's been chugging along for 7 years now, and even a Micropolis 5gb drive from about 9 years back
Re:Buy Seagate! (Score:2)
Bigfoot (Score:2)
(FYI: Quantum made the Bigfoot drives that are 5.25" quarter-height. i.e. two fit in a normal 5.35" bay)
I've got an abacus that still works! (Score:2)
Relevant for home users? (Score:2)
Cost, capacity, speed, and noise are all good to know about, but
PXI buss speed clips perfromance back to IDE (Score:2)
anyone care to comment on that? If so what's the point other than a groovy glow in the dark cable. Just buy IDE if you are a home user.
Re:Relevant for home users? (Score:2)
Don't use Raid1. Raid does nothing to prevent the #1 cause (IME) for data recovery: accidental deletion. Instead, take that second drive and make weekly full backups with nightly incrementals.
Also, keep the stuff you care about (photos, tax records) in a certain folder and burn it to a DVD every once in a while, encrypted. Leave the DVD with a relative or somewhere else you have a good chance of getting to it later.
I think this wil
Clueless presentation (Score:5, Insightful)
The graph uses the same X axis to compare three totally different quantities: CPU percentage, access time in milliseconds, and bandwidth in MB/sec. As a bonus, note that smaller values for CPU % and access time are good, but larger values of bandwidth are good.
Edward Tufte, where are you?
Re:Clueless presentation (Score:2, Interesting)
I just gotta say (Score:4, Insightful)
Newegg link $139 for 300GB drive (Score:2)
$500 to rent a TB (Score:2)
You could use four and a dedicated controller card and be under a thousand dollars for 900GB and you might actually have that data past the first disc failure... or you could buy three Seagates for about a hundred bucks more than the Maxtors and have a much better chance of keeping your data around until the next upgrade.
Another drive of course (Score:2)
The point being... (Score:2)
Any of that stuff costs a lot more than 500 bucks.
Clarification (Score:2)
Note that I did not say the total would still be $500, I was just describing a good way to back it up. Yes it's another $500 but it's optional (if you don't care about your stuff much). Personally I'd prefer half a TB of stuff with a backup than a full TB with none
Re:I just gotta say (Score:2)
No, the nuts part is the data we will be storing that requires petabytes! A terabyte is pretty easy to fill nowadays, e.g., photos, scans of books, online copies of (my) DVDs and CDs, but a petabyte requires a bit more imagination (with the exception of "record every aspect of my life").
Ways to use that extra space: (Score:2, Funny)
-make a personal backup of archive.org [archive.org]
-Store digital photos of every square inch of your neighborhood.
-ASCII pr0n. lots and lots of ASCII pr0n.
"300 GB ought to be enough for anybody"
Re:Ways to use that extra space: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ways to use that extra space: (Score:2)
The raw bit-rate in camera of HDV is 25Mb, but this is expanded, at least on Macs, into Apple Intermediate Format which takes up significantly more space again.
Before I got the powermac, I really struggle
Re:Ways to use that extra space: (Score:2)
Re:Ways to use that extra space: (Score:2)
Print it all out and store it in 3-ring binders, we wouldn't want to deprive future generations of our ASCII pr0n.
Of course you'll need space to keep the binders - I suggest Nevada, they have lots of open space and not too much rain. Rain is the natural enemy of ASCII pr0n printouts.
Roundup? (Score:3)
Re:Roundup? (Score:2)
HJ
large volume raid storage (Score:2)
Well... I'm not impressed by 16MB of cache. (Score:2)
The most interesting thing on that page was a link to a hard disk encryption [cypherix.com] software in an ad.
Compare it with the Seagate Cheetah [seagate.com] wich offers 96MB/s sustained data transfer rate while the sustained transfer rate is undocumented on the Diamond Max. Same goes for the average seek time that is OK, now
Re:Well... I'm not impressed by 16MB of cache. (Score:3, Insightful)
Open source hard disk encryption (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps usernames should be less obvious... (Score:3, Interesting)
Maxtorn writes...
Nice username and he submits a story about Maxtor drives. Perhaps we'll get stories from Seagated, AppleJack or Solarister next.
Linux SATA support? (Score:2)
I know the driver support is there for mounting from an existing distro. I guess I just want to use my nice new SATA drive as my bootable drive. At least on Ubuntu...
Re:Linux SATA support? (Score:3, Informative)
I can't speak to Ubunto, but SATA works fine using the Sarge install. Just boot the linux26 target rather than linux as the default Sarge install target uses Linux 2.4 which though does support SATA, doesn't support the wealth of chipsets 2.6 does. I've done several installs on SAATA root and all have gone well.
Sarge will even do SATA software raid (Score:2)
Sarge sees them as seperate drives despite the raid controller reporting them as 1 logical.
I was able to setup software mirroring with no problems. Speed is not great.
Re:Sarge will even do SATA software raid (Score:2)
Re:Linux SATA support? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linux SATA support? (Score:2)
Whenever I inquired in a help forum about how to install Linux on a SATA drive, I was always given a convoluted sequence of steps to negotiate. It wasn't the kernel's fault, because the kernel had SATA support. It was the distros who decided that no one
Fluff (Score:2, Informative)
For real hard drive reviews try storagereview.com.
just a little biased . . . (Score:2, Informative)
Let's see, after actually reading the article, the Maxtor drive didn't beat the Seagate 2007.8 drive in ANY of the real-world tests and a 5 year warranty through Seagate is the best warranty I've ever seen. They've never rejected replacement from me on any drive, SCSI or IDE.
Uninteresting (Score:2)
Nor can I understand the conclusion. Especially in the warranty, but also in the access time, this drive is beat by the Seagate. Still, it gets the highest praise (as therefore 5 stars).
Then there are some other problems with the article:
- SATA300 not tested (would be unfair for the competetion according to the author
Self review? (Score:5, Funny)
My favorite part is when the submitter reviews his own review:
A solid reference for those shopping for a new drive.
In other news, Rob Schneider says "Deuce Bigalow 2" is "a comedic tour-de-force that will leave you wanting more."
Dan Brown, author of "The DaVinci Code", further chimed in saying, "My book is 100% factual, and the Catholic Church is teh suX0r!!!1!!"
Slashdotting (Score:2)
And if, by chance, the article hasn't show up before - we simply wait until it appears again. Maybe the dupe will have links.
'Cause it's slowing down already:
Mirrordot mirror:
http://www.mirrordot.com/stories/fc9b34ac4dfe751a
Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary? (Score:3, Interesting)
In my case exactly so. One of my PCs is my MP3 server and *.avi cache. I find myself juggling files of ~1Gb on a regular basis every time I download another *.avi. I'd just love to upgrade my 80Gb to 300Gb and now I can afford to.
In my experience the amount of data we store is directly proportional to the size of the available storage media. When all you co
Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary? (Score:2, Interesting)
For the cost and ease of management (ie no time spent transfering things peicemeal to other mediums) huge hard drives are the best solution I've seen so far. There's always the possibility of data corruption from leaving your precious 300GB harddrive running nonstop in a poorly ventilated case with your up and down pipes going fullblast with bittorrents but it's not like you stand to lose much except your computers time.
I guess some people have legitimate arc
Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary? (Score:2)
Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary? (Score:2)
A lot of that is video/movies, with some more being audio. Another LARGE portion is that I keep ISO's of all my CD's. Backup copies of CD's are great for protection against damage, but given that my backups and originals generally get stored in the same place, they're useless if I misplace a group of CD's. With all the images stored I can easily burn another copy if necessary or just mount the image if I j
Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary? (Score:2)
Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary? (Score:2)
Now think about the fact that 20megapixel SLR's will be available to the consumer cleaply within 2 years and I can certianly see filling a 300 gig drive easily on the weekend after a vacation. And this is only for my hokey home stuff.
Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary? (Score:3, Informative)
My Hard drives are smaller than tapes would be. They let me get at all my video instantly. They let m
Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary? (Score:2)
Well, you're right about archiving (lossless, live) music. What medium would you suggest as an alternative? CD/DVD-Rs have lifespans that are about the same as a hard drive, and it's much easier to back up a single hard drive rather than hundreds of CDs.
Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary? (Score:2)
I use mine to store Doctor Who episodes. But I have a girlfriend so I'm not a totally lost case.
Re:Is that the limit, then? (Score:2)
Re:Some fine points: (Score:2)
I proved it recently with a RAID 5 card from adaptec for SATA compared to a equliviant card with old U160 SCSI drives.
the SCSI drives kicked the living crap out of the SATA raid array in performance alone. SQL was much faster as well as file serving (using the file server to serve up 2gb image files for deploy center imaging.
there was at least a 2X speed difference and SQL was ending up even faster on the SCSI compared to the SATA array.
the ONLY downside