High-End, High-Capacity SATA-150 Roundup

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."

Comments

SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Limburgher]

The review isn't clear, but does this drive have both interfaces, or is it available in two flavours?

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?

[Limburgher]

Answered my own question with the data sheet on Maxtor's site. It's two flavours, not a drive with two connectors.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[AKAImBatman]

Just an interesting FYI, the Western Digital SATA drives have only one connector for data (SATA), but for some reason have two connectors for power! The first is the new SATA power connector, while the second is an old fashioned hard drive/cdrom power connector. Because of this, I didn't realize that SATA had a new power cable when I built my new computer, and I initially had the drives plugged into the old-fashioned drive connectors.

The entire time I was wondering what those new-fangled connectors coming out of the power supply were for. Especially since there were so many of them! If anyone else makes the same mistake I did, then it shouldn't hurt anything. However, you might be a bit confused when others speak of "SATA power connectors". ;-)

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Chaotic Spyder]

I've never tried one...
But these Are an option I see more and more of to allow a SATA drive to work on an ATA cable

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[RealityMogul]

I didn't realize there was a new connector either. Well, until I ordered a Seagate SATA drive and realized there was no place to plug in a molex connector. Had to wait 3 days till the adapters came in. I hate waiting.

Now, could somebody explain why the hell they made a new power connector?

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Anonymous Coward]

To make it easier to disconnect and reconnect for hot swap capability, and also the new connectors connect the neutral wires before the power wires are connected to prevent electrical problems.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hot-Swapability is the reason!

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Phreakiture]

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.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[wpmegee]

Hot plugging was the chief reason I believe. Don't know who in their right mind would hot-swap an internal drive while the system was on tho...

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[drgonzo59]

If you have a RAID-1 array and a server that has to be on all the time. Then you remove the "bad" hard drive and insert a "good" one while the system is on. An internal drive can be hot-swapped if it is put in a special craddle with a handle and a lock. This has been the case with SCSI drives for a long time.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

It's two flavours, not a drive with two connectors.

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?

[stinerman]

An internal drive can be hot-swapped if it is put in a special craddle with a handle and a lock.

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?

[thc69]

The cradles usually have their own connectors, so you're not pulling the thing out and unplugging two loose cables that may not reach.

However, I hot-swap internal drives with an IDE to USB adapter (effectively making them external), and if I had SATA drives, I'd probably hot-swap those too. Why accept gratuitous reboots, when I simply want temporary access to different data?

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[fimbulvetr]

Must have been a pretty old system. On most of my (at home) hardware now, I'm not afraid to reseat the pci cards (Nic/modem/etc.), nor plug/unplug ide/power for the cdroms while they are running. Yeah I know it's insane, but I've never had a problem. It's fun living on the edge.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[drgonzo59]

Unless the drives were SCSI and were meant to be "hot swapped" you shouldn't do it. I "hot swapped" an Athlon CPU before, I was testing a motherboard and forgot to turn the power off, I removed the CPU and I think that killed it.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[mrjackson2000]

i have one from a dif mfg, it works fine and looks a ton better, all enclosed.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[RealityMogul]

You at least wear an anti-static wrist strap while you're doing that, right.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's fun living on the edge.

You misspelled "being stupid". HTH. HAND.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[StarCat76]

Hehe, I got lucky with that kind of thing once. I accidentally unplugged my master IDE hard drive while the machine was on (the one the root filesystem was mounted from). The computer kept running fine, and after I plugged it back in I could read from it fine. There were several scary-looking messages in the kernel log, though.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's so that they can make external hdd easier. CompUSA has an external sata drive right now. My new asus mb came with a port to put a sata connector in one of the pci slt covers.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[TheViffer]

With all the Lance Armstrong wrist bands running around not only would anti-static wrist straps be functional, but also stylish.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Anonymous Coward]

I never use a wrist strap when swapping hot-swap drives in sleds, or connecting/disconnecting external SCSI devices. Never killed a device in over 15 years of dealing with SCSI.

Dealt with hot-swap serial devices prior to that (Commie/Amiga and Macintosh) and never had a failure there.

I've "accidentally" hot swapped an ATAPI (IDE) device once, frying the controller, and I had a wrist strap on at the time.

Most failures like that are purely luser error (see the IDE failure) and not accidental static discharge.

Note: quality drive sleds are metal and will ground the drive to the chassis long before the SCA-80 or SATA connectors are anywhere near enough to arc from static, let alone mate up for the data and power connections. I would never bother with a wrist strap for swapping a drive. When working on computers I usually don't bother with ground straps; I just make sure I touch a metal part of the chassis prior to touching internal components. I've never had any static-related failures. I've had boards burn up due to bad caps (I'm never using Abit boards again), IBM Deathstar drives die, Western Digital drives die (I no longer buy any hard drives with 3yr warranty), etc. but not a single failure related to static.

People hype up the static issue but then go cheap on motherboards, power supplies, and drives. I don't get it.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[RicktheBrick]

Why is 16MBytes of cache considered so great when video interface cards now have maximum of 512MBytes and one can buy one with 64Mbytes for a cheap price. I would think they could easily put in 64Mbytes. I see the read speed is around 50Mbytes/second or around 400Mbits/second. I guess this is only 4 times as fast as the recently announced speed for the internet of 100Mbits/second for cable modems. So lets say one needs to load a 50Mbytes program than loading it from a local disk would take just 1 second or 4 seconds for the internet assuming your local isp is the source of that program. I have read of some who claim that we can download at a gigabits/sec over telephone cables. So we should see the day within 10 years when the difference between a local drive and one at a local isp will be so small that it will make no difference to the user. There have been recent articles about putting flash memory on hard drives so that they do not have to spin as much as they do today. That is the flash memory is used until it is full and than the memory is written to the hard drive. Since flash memory keeps it's state even when there is a power loss there is little danger of losing data. I would think that some mention of this in the article would have been nice. It would seem to me that maybe they could provide a battery backup for the cache to help with this problem so they could also reduce wear and tear on the disk. I see a new pci card came out this year for ram memory that will not lose it's memory when the computer is shut down since there is current going through it even when the computer is shut off. It has a battery for the few times when power is lost and will maintain it's state for around a day even without power. This card is only around $60 so the battery must not be that expensive. With all of these advancements in other technologies I do not see why hard drives are not using them.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Doc Ruby]

How about a RAID of 80GB drives, each with 1GB of cache? That's like $100:80GB drive, $1.25:GB, with a minimum 12.5% cache hit rate. And I bet the combined cost of manufacturing/selling would be lower than the separate components, so more profitable than the rock-bottom prices they're getting for low-cache drives. RAIDs also consume extra drives for redundancy. It's really surprising that Hitachi isn't selling a SAN storage box, with RAID, cache, and even transfer to removable Flash cards, all within the box, for reliability, performance and convenience.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[fbjon]

No need. I hot-swap two old 6GB and 4GB Quantum Fireballs and use them as portable storage. I simply plug the power, plug the IDE connector, and start the "Detect new hardware" wizard. Moments later, Windows cheerfully finds the drive and assigns a drive letter. When removing, simply uninstall the hardware, and you can unplug it right away. This is on Win2K, btw.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Doc Ruby]

I put my tongue on several platters of some old 500MB drives (5.25", full-height, RLL, 1991) I was salvaging at a scrapper. The Maxtors tasted different from the Seagates. But the Seagates were East Bay realtors, while the Maxtors were South Bay bankers. Maybe just the data tastes different.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[jandrese]

The downside of a large cache on the drive is that you lose more data when the power goes out. You can't use nifty features like CTQ unless your drive is caching writes either. It's a tradeoff.

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, could somebody explain why the hell they made a new power connector?

They did it in order to achieve faster data rates, better quality from your video files and less noise when playing your music files; but you will need Monster Cables to get the most of those features!

Re:SATA-150 and Ultra ATA-133?

[squoozer]

Interesting idea. If it's all the same I will let you do it with your mission critical servers. I think I will just suffer a few minutes down time.

A look at the review summary

[ackthpt]

A look at the evaluation (from my humble pointy head):

Pros:

• Fastest SATA-150 drive tested to date

No issue with speed, it's good.

• Several capacities available, with 300GB being the highest

Not unexpected from and industry leader.

• Quiet operation

Weighty consideration for the home or office, a brace of noisy drives is unwelcome while trying to watch video or listen to music on the computer.

• Supports Native Command Queuing

Fine.

• Excellent value, only 48 cents per GB

Really this is a minor concern, unless you're building a storage rack and only care bang/buck. If I want cool and quiet, I'll pay extra for it.

• 16 MB of cache memory provides a nice performance boost

The bottleneck isn't likely to be your cache it's your MB and OS, but always nice to have more cache.

Cons:

• Runs a bit warmer than other drives

Might warrant an extra fan if running a brace or more, potentially negating and quiet running. I've got an old Quantum drive you could fry an egg on and the heat effectively is killing the bearing lubricant.

• Three year warranty is good, but not the best

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.

Re:A look at the review summary

[SSpade]

• Three year warranty is good, but not the best

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.

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

[ackthpt]

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.

True, but when a drive dies, which is your major concern, the cost of replacement or the amount of time you'll spend recovering from its death (restoring files, etc., or simply kissing them all good-bye.)

Re:A look at the review summary

[Phreakiture]

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

[xkenny13]

* Three year warranty is good, but not the best

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

[mlyle]

True, but when a drive dies, which is your major concern, the cost of replacement or the amount of time you'll spend recovering from its death (restoring files, etc., or simply kissing them all good-bye.)

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 you buy a drive from a manufacturer with a long warranty, you may have a lower risk of having to spend time recovering from its death during a reasonable deployment lifetime.

Re:A look at the review summary

[bedroll]

Maxtor has had reliability issues for some time now. I remember when I was a young teen and my father liked Maxtor because they were cheap and he did back-ups. When one died - we had a lot so there were deaths frequently - we'd send it back to them, warrantee or not. If it was under warrantee then we'd get a new one for free, if not then we had to pay substantially less than had we not returned the drive.

Seagate, on the other hand, I don't remember ever having to return one of their drives. I remember them running until they were replaced for higher capacity models. Thus, I always associated Seagate with higher quality. They were also more expensive.

The trade off was little. We spent about the same amount buying cheap drives and returning them as we did expensive drives that lasted.

Things to consider: All this happened almost 15 years ago, quality control can change a lot in that time. I typically buy on price now and haven't had a drive fail in years. The Maxtor drives were IDE while the Seagate ones were SCSI. If back-ups are involved then concern only becomes which drive you think will have the lowest cost when averaged over it's lifetime. That lifetime consists of operational and functional (a 4GB drive today isn't good for much more than swap).

Re:A look at the review summary

[drgonzo59]

Good point. My 3 year old IBM 60GXP Deskstar ("Deathstar") just died taking with it lots of data, digitized movies, music and tons of installed applicatoin. Not all have been backed-up. When I bought the drive I thought that IBM makes reliable hardware and I would pay more for quality. As it turned out, the Deskstar series, have been having problems and are known to fail now. IBM dumped their hard drive unit faster than a hot potato. Not sure if the failure of the Deathstars is to blame.

Anyway my point is that Maxtor is not known to have drives of the highest quality. Their drives are often carried by Circuit City, Best Buy at lower price than WD, Seagate or others. The problem is that you don't know when you buy a new unit if it is plagued by quality issues, only a couple of years later you might find many others on the net complaining about sudden failures.

Also I am not sure if warranty is of much help. Sure, if I had a 5 year warranty, I would get a new drive from IBM. But hell, do I want another drive from them? Besides it is not the drive itself that is of much value (to me at least) but the data on it, and IBM can't to much about my lost project data.

Re:A look at the review summary

[madman101]

Does anyone do backups anymore? Only the smart ones. Drives die.

Re:A look at the review summary

[ackthpt]

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.

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

• Within 1 year
• 2 years
• 3 years
• ...
• 10 years

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? People upgrade their systems on average every 18 months, no? (and I include businesses in on that figure)

5 years? That's an eternity and probably a very, very safe bet.

Expecting anyone to actually keep records of their computer part purchases over on year (let alone 5 minutes after the drive was pulled from it's carton) is another study I'd like to see. I bet drive manufactures (or anyone who makes anything warranteed) has a pretty good idea on the liability expense they can expect to incur.

Re:A look at the review summary

[drgonzo59]

At the same time, the warranty policy might be a rectroactive measure after an internal report is issued that the new drives have high failure rates and perhaps it leaks to the web. Then the company might increase the warranty to continue selling the drives. Most people that have warranties probably won't have time to go through the process of getting a replacement in case of failure. They'll probably mourn their lost data for a while then quickly run to their favorite computer store to get a _another_ brand. The warranty, I think, also gives the consumer that "warm and fuzzy" feeling of security and it generates tons of $$$ for places like Best Buy were they'll badger you until you get the "extended warranty".

Re:A look at the review summary

[ender-]

I mean, geez who's still buying 40 GB drives and those were only a couple years ago, right? People upgrade their systems on average every 18 months, no? (and I include businesses in on that figure)

5 years? That's an eternity and probably a very, very safe bet.

Expecting anyone to actually keep records of their computer part purchases over on year (let alone 5 minutes after the drive was pulled from it's carton) is another study I'd like to see.

Actually, I've used this in the past as a free upgrade. I've had a drive die after several years and when I RMA'd it, they no longer had inventory of that model. As a result I was sent a higher-capacity HD as a replacement. Very nice.

And you don't need to keep your receipt. The drive manufacturers all have records of the SN of your HD and when it was made [and often when it was sold]. You have only to enter the SN into their website or RMA phone service and they will tell you if the drive is still in warranty. At least I assume they all do. I know from experience that Seagate, IBM and Hitatchi all do this. I can't imagine that WD and Maxtor don't as well.

Re:A look at the review summary

[sapgau]

Yes but it only takes a certain percentage of your customers to kill you in warranty claims. And worse if it's found that you were misrepresenting the warranty to mislead the public.

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?

Re:A look at the review summary

[tigris]

Just sent a new 300-GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drive (7200.8, 5 year warranty) back to Zipzoomfly. Total operation time before it failed completely? 22 days (running 24/7). The failed drive was in a well-cooled RAID-1 configuration with an identical Seagate and that drive is doing just fine. I've had Maxtors and Hitachis fail too, but never that fast. Regardless of manufacturer, I now take a "Trust, But Mirror" approach to all drives I use.

Re:A look at the review summary

[j.a.mcguire]

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. Really? In that scenario the warranty would be my first concern!

Re:A look at the review summary

[timeOday]

Expecting anyone to actually keep records of their computer part purchases over on year (let alone 5 minutes after the drive was pulled from it's carton) is another study I'd like to see.

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, because it's 1) likely to fail and 2) expensive enough to matter.

Re:A look at the review summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides it is not the drive itself that is of much value (to me at least) but the data on it
 
Then maybe you should have considered backing up that data...

Re:A look at the review summary

[Bad_Feeling]

Anyway my point is that Maxtor is not known to have drives of the highest quality. Their drives are often carried by Circuit City, Best Buy at lower price than WD, Seagate or others. The problem is that you don't know when you buy a new unit if it is plagued by quality issues, only a couple of years later you might find many others on the net complaining about sudden failures.

I would agree that Maxtor sucks. About a year or so after I bought a Max 40GB EIDE, the drive developed a problem of refusing to spin up on startup before several retries. It still works after about 3 or 4 years, but i keep it on all the time so it wont bitch. Meanwhile I have a WD 80Gig EIDE that is about a year older and it hums away no problems at all.

Re:A look at the review summary

[ptbarnett]

As it turned out, the Deskstar series, have been having problems and are known to fail now.

It's been known for years. When the DeathStar debacle became public, I replaced mine shortly thereafter with a pair of Western Digital drives.

I gave them to a friend that used them in lab machines for evaluating Linux distributions. They lasted for another 6 months or so, after which he took them apart for a class demonstration and used various pieces to decorate his office.

Re:A look at the review summary

[Deekin_Scalesinger]

Do you not research the hwardware you are considering for purchase? For shame - ah well, a lesson to hopefully be learned only once.

Re:A look at the review summary

[drsmithy]

The bottleneck isn't likely to be your cache it's your MB and OS, but always nice to have more cache.

The bottleneck isn't in the "MB and OS", it's in the physical drive mechanism. That's why you have cache there - to minimise that bottleneck.

Re:A look at the review summary

[Cplus]

I'm paranoid in the level of research that I put into hardware purchases. Hell, that's probably the only reason I'm reading this thread.

Re:A look at the review summary

[Woody77]

how?

When I was in HS, tape easily outstripped the size of the HD in the common home computer, for realtively cheap tape drives (we're talking 32-64MB drives here).

I've priced out various backup options for the 1TB media server I want to build. $$$$$$

Cheapeast actually appears to be just dumping the files to slow, big SATA drives sequentially. And that's still nearly $500 per backup copy.

Take will run you $1200 for a drive that can even get close to that, and then $50 a tape, but you need to span across several tapes, just like the drives. But at least then at twp copies you've made up the difference.

But the array itself costs nearly that much (including controller).

Scaling back for more "normal" home users, with say 250GB or so of files, they're options are either another drive, and to do it right, an external hot-swap cage and maybe 2-3 drives on rotation (so... $500?) Or to go the tape route again. But I've had a hell of a time finding decent places to research and price out the various current tape drives/formats.

The problem is that backups used to be easy. Spend maybe $100 down at the local 'puter shop, and take home a boxed drive with software and enough tapes to easily do backup rotations. That's just not the case anymore.

Re:Avoiding Slashdoting

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds good, is there a Slashdot congress where this can be debated?

Are geeks democratic?

:-/

/not trolling, just askin'

Buy Seagate!

[wpmegee]

I always try to buy seagate, ~$10 price difference, and the 5-year warranty is priceless. You only get a 3-year warranty on most other drives, or 1 year if you buy retail Western Digital.

And if you see Maxtor, run like the wind!

Re:Buy Seagate!

[ackthpt]

I like Seagate myself, as they tend to be quieter and cooler.

I've got two different HD's (Seagate and WD) in my home system and one is mewing, like the motor is beginning to fail. I need to figure out which drive it is. It's probably going to be the WD as the system continues to boot and the WD is just storage of videos which I don't often access.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[calibanDNS]

Offtopic, but I've never gotten why everyone is so down on Maxtor drives. Maybe it's just me, but Maxtors have been the most reliable drives in my experience. I just got my first two Seagate drives about 3 months ago, so I can't claim to make a good judgement about them yet, but they're doing better than I would expect out of a Western Digital. In the past decade I've had at least 5 WD drives fail on me. Someone once told me that I had to be abusing the case that 3 of these WDs failed in, but in that same case I had a 540MB Maxtor drive that was running fine (and seeing more use than the WDs). Actually, that 540MB Maxtor is STILL running just fine to this day (over 10 years after I got it). I'll be buying Maxtor (and probably Seagate) drives for the forseeable future and I've sworn off WD.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using WD IDE drives for years, in capacities ranging from 20 to 250Gb. Never a problem running on my home PCs.
My current drive is a Maxtor 300Gb SATA that has been running flawlessly since Feb of this year.

The only hard drive that's ever failed me in 17 years of building PCs was an IBM Desktar 70Gb. It started getting write failures when it reached about 50% capacity. Fortunately it was within warranty and IBM replaced it. I still have it, but only use it as a backup. Once bitten...

Re:Buy Seagate!

[TheRaven64]

I'm down on Maxtor because of the three Maxtor drives I've owned, two have catastrophically died within months of the warrantee expiring. I have not had this experience with drives from other manufacturers.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[wpmegee]

I've only owned one maxtor, got burned on a 5400rpm 30gb way back when - received 3 faulty drives in a row - could've been the Dell system it was in, which I subsequently junked. Also had 2 WDs fail on me, one of which was my fault.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[MBGMorden]

I'd put money on the WD as well. Only WD I ever owned myself failed. When I worked tech support at a large university we also saw about 3x as many WD's fail as any other brand, and the majority of our computers ran Maxtor drives.

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. The rest of my drives are newer Seagates and Samsungs but all have worked well.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[zakezuke]

I always try to buy seagate, ~$10 price difference, and the 5-year warranty is priceless. You only get a 3-year warranty on most other drives, or 1 year if you buy retail Western Digital.

  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 have mail ordered a Barracuda but that would be $20 more and they are only offered in ATA-100 or SATA for more.

In all fairness to the claim, I have had one 60gig 5200rpm maxtor drive fail, and one 7200 20gig fail, both carried a 3 year warranty at the time. A third but my PS was miswired.. 12V on 5V... stupid thing. I have recieved maxtors and western digitals 2nd hand that were not acting properly, but they were still under warranty. On the other hand I isolated many of my power issues to a crappy breaker so I can't honestly say if it was my drive or the fact that my power would cutout randomly.

But the reason I end up going maxtor is those are the ones that end up being onsale for amazingly low prices at Office Depot and Compusa. I have no complex loyalty to maxtor, and in fact am annoyed at the lack of a 3 year warranty like many other drives have.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[aled]

Almost in every PC I used from 1990 with a Maxtor hard drive it got ruined. It must be 4 or 5 disks.
I never got an issue with Quantum fireballs, though a bigfoot broked.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[canadiangoose]

My guess would be because they are very sensitive to overheating. I've got a few 'servers' here at work that some nut built using 5 Maxtor PATA drives in each enclosure, packed right next to each other. Each and every single one of the 6 servers built that way has had a catastrophic drive failure since they were installed about a year ago.

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 allow your drive to run above 55 degrees celcius, a very reasonable number.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had several Maxtor drives fail after being less than a year old. Heat will kill any drive but a Maxtor is is way more likely to fail withing 3 years and a WD, well, lets just say never put anything important on a WD drive!

Re:Buy Seagate!

[Anonymous Coward]

The 120GB Maxtor in my Tivo has run 24/7 for several years. I'd buy seagate also, but thought I'd chime in that Maxtors can keep going

Re:Buy Seagate!

[Eugene]

I have not had any dead Maxtor for quite a while, (and I'm averaging having one dead HD every 2-3 month for a few years now). I currently own 8 Maxtor HDs range from 80GB-300GB in capacity, I also own Seagate, Western Digital, and Fujitsu HDs

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 dead HD, they tend to saying XXX brand is bad for them, and YYY brand is good. and to me a lot of those problem were came from a single bad batch instead of bad brand. and every brand suffer those problems.. (unless, you are talking about deathstar, they have at least 3 bad GENERATIONS)

my last 2 casualty were dead 1200JB and 1600JD..

Re:Buy Seagate!

[ender-]

The only hard drive that's ever failed me in 17 years of building PCs was an IBM Desktar 70Gb. It started getting write failures when it reached about 50% capacity.

There's a reason those drives were called "Deathstars". I worked for a hosting company. We had 3000+ servers most of which had those IBM drives [40-80GB mostly]. The failure rate on those drives was just obscene. The other brands didn't fail nearly as much [taking into account the proportion of how many were used].

With that said, every drive manufacturer has their good models and bad models. My earliest HD's were a pair of 5.25" 40MB Seagate MFM HD's I got with a 286. They lasted for-freekin-ever. I was still using them with a P200MMX.
Then for awhile WD's were the good quality drive while Seagate's were crap for awhile. Then WD's quality dropped and Seagate was ok [though not great]. Maxtor has had it's ups and downs, etc. So I don't bother to carry a long-time grudge with a HD manufacturer because I know that there's a good chance that future models from them will be great products while future models from a currently great manuf. will be crap.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[(startx)]

Hurray for anicdotal evidence!

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.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[X_Bones]

yep, my experience has been largely the same as yours. I'm still running with the same Maxtor 20GB drive I bought six years ago; three WD hard drives have failed on me in that time span, and the Maxtors I bought to replace them have been running like champs.

</aol>

Re:Buy Seagate!

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the same issue, I had two IBM drives and BOTH failed! Clicking noises, whirlign noises, the works. I had so much *cough* stuff on there that comes in handy for my "research"

Re:Buy Seagate!

[CoderJoe]

Interesting. Over the past 10 years, I have purchased drives from many different manufacturers, and I've had far fewer problems with WD than any other brand. especially when you go off of the ratios of failures to total drives owned. I probably have owned around 50 WD drives over time and have only had 2 problems (one DOA (I think it got dropped before I got it or something), and one external drive that died, likely from impact as well). I've only owned a few maxtor and have had 2 failures. I've owned a few seagates, and now that I think of it, no failures. I have owned two IBMs and at least one had failed. I also owned a few fujitsu and had at least one failure. the only recent manufacturer I have not owned drives from would be Samsung.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[Anonymous Coward]

Offtopic, but I've never gotten why everyone is so down on Maxtor drives.

Neither have I. I've got four of em running in a raid that have been happily humming along now 24x7 for about two years. Another decent drive is Samsung, though their capacities lag a bit.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[NadaTech]

I have been a PC Tech for over 20 years and have been working with computers 10 years before that. In my experience, the reliability factor of hard drives is similar to that of antivirus: They have their good years and their bad years. Someone said Quantum was a good drive. I beg to differ. The Bigfoot drives are pure junk. Maxtor used to be slow and unreliable in the early '90's, and Western Digital was the greatest. Now? I think Maxtor is the best drive to date, with EDeagate running a close second and Hitachi 3rd. I have been seeing Western Digitals fail at a rate of about 3 A DAY! I have not seen a Maxtor drive failed in the last 4 months. I have seen 2 Quantums in the last week as well. I must say I have never come across a failed Hitachi and very few failed Seagates. Their problems were they were just too damned slow. From a professional with hands on experience, currently Maxtor is the best. Tomorrow it may be Seagate.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[runderwo]

The failure mode is also something to take into account. Of the WDs I've owned that failed, they failed by click-of-death - no chance of data recovery. Maxtor has never click-of-deathed me; once the read errors and strange noises start occuring, I usually have time to back up. This last time the failure caught me by surprise and I lost probably 10% of a full 200GB disk. I'm buying Seagate for all new drives so we'll see how that goes...

Re:Buy Seagate!

[sodul]

Well you're lucky.

When I started in my company in january I got a brand new Dell with a 160GB SATA drive from Maxtor.

Performance was piss poor and the drive died after 2 weeks. Having seen a dozen drive from maxtor die last year, I blamed the manufacturer and asked to get an other brand.
Some other employees did not ask for an other brand and got their replacement maxtor to fail, lossing work twice in a few weeks.
A few month later IT was replacing all the maxtor drives proactively (they had one drive dying every week on average).

We lost a lot of many with these drives. I know of a bad batch that was sent to Dell, failure were so hight that Dell returned the batch ... which was sent to the european market.

I trust Seagate or Hitcahi much more than Maxtor. 3 years ago I was only trusting Maxtor.

For laptops or very small hardrives like in the iPod or the lifedrive Hitachi is MUCH better than Seagate.

So it's not "I had a Maxtor drive 5 years ago and it failed just after the waranty expired" it's we had the whole company with Maxtor drive and we had to throw them away. There is a reason Maxtor only give you a 1 year waranty: they can't afford replacing all the drives that are going to fail after a year and a half.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[jandrese]

The big problem is that a great many PC case manufactuers provide for no active cooling on the drive bays at all. This is one big reason why people have so much trouble with their drives, especially when they add a second one (usually crammed right next to the old drive).

Re:Buy Seagate!

[KillerEggRoll]

In a consumer-oriented sense, there really is no more reason to bash Maxtor than WD, etc. But I know that we have not as much luck with the IDE line in a RAID chassis. I'm not sure if it is because they aren't sufficiently able to handle the level of vibration in such an environment or if we just had a bad batch (on order of > 1000). I do know that we have had more luck with WDs and have not had nearly the same failure rate with SATA WD and Hitachis.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me throw some more useless empirical evidence into this thread. I've had *4* Quantum Fireballs die on me, each one lasting no more then a year. I'm talking about 4 full "used, died, exchanged" cycles back to back. This was the 3.2GB model..

Re:Buy Seagate!

[Digital Pizza]

Once the topic of drive failure regarding a particular brand comes up in a thread, it tends to gain momentum. Everyone who had that brand of drive fail on them (understandably) wants to complain, while those who've had no problem lose interest in the thread and don't post. What that leads to is a thread with almost nothing but complaints about that brand. This happens with every brand of drive; they all produce some duds, it's inevitable.

I have five 40GB maxtors, two are old 5400RPM drives, the others are 7200RPM. A couple of them have developed noisy bearings (after years of use) but no errors among any of them, and three of them were running 24x7 for years.

I've had only one Western Digital drive die on me, an ancient 1GB drive whose time had come.

Seagate drives have been good to me, although I remember back in the mid to late 80's when they had "sticktion" problems; I had one of those, a 47GB SCSI drive that I'd have to give a quick "twist" to start up. Surprisingly, I got years of use out of it.

The only brand that screwed me over was IBM. I had bought them because of their reputation for quality, but that went out the window with the Deskstars. Had two 60GB desktop drives, a 12GB laptop drive, and a 40GB laptop drive fail on me. I'd bought them all at around the same time, except for one of the 60GB drives which was an RMA replacement for the first, so I didn't have a chance to learn-and-avoid.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[lucifuge31337]

though a bigfoot broked.

OMFG....bad memories. I was still a box-buster bench tech back when these came out. Compaq Prolinea something or others had them, and like 40% of the boxes they were in ended up back on my bench within 6 months, and the rest were recalled shortly after that (making the remaining 60% end up on my bench). And of course warranty repair covers physically swapping the drive only....CPQ was nice enough to put a default OS load on there like the PC just came out of the box. Imagine how much fun it was to deal with customers on that one.

I believe it was around that time that I got really familiar with Gost. Before Norton bought the company and screwed it up.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[AaronW]

I agree with this. A couple weeks ago I put together a new Athlon64 system and when it came to cases I saw a lot of really cool looking cases that claimed all sorts of features for cooling, but lacked fans blowing across the hard drives. I finally went with an Antec case, which while was not nearly the coolest looking, had excellent cooling capabilities, including for the hard drives. The other thing I looked for was air filtering support to help keep out the dust. This case had some filtering, but not as much as I'd like.

A number of years ago I ran a Maxtor full-height 1.7GB SCSI drive that would get extremely hot, so I added fans to help keep it cool. My father put together a system with the same drive, but no fans. While I never had a drive failure, my father went through several drives. The only difference was the cooling.

-Aaron

Re:Buy Seagate!

[Anonymous Coward]

You had a 47GB SCSI drive in the 80's?

Re:Buy Seagate!

[Sloppy]

Offtopic, but I've never gotten why everyone is so down on Maxtor drives

I guess different people just have different experiences. I have a bunch of Maxtors and none of them have failed, but most of 'em are part of a RAID inside a nice windy aluminum case where they don't get too hot, and I'm practically daring one to die just so I can laughingly replace it.

My guess, based on various experiences (both good and bad), is that heat is the #1 killer of drives. I've had two drives die in machines that spent a lot of time in my car (in New Mexico (it gets hot here)), and my previous failure was maybe about 10 years ago, a 7200 rpm scsi micropolis that lived in a poor-ventilated Amiga 3000 case. Heat is what they all had in common.

Maybe (this is based on anecdotal hearsay) Maxtors really are less tolerant of heat, and thus inferior. But if you're going to use 'em somewhere where they won't get too hot, my thinking is that the low price makes 'em worthwhile. And if the machine isn't mobile (i.e. space/weight isn't a major concern) then just buy two of 'em and mirror. If you care about reliability, you're going to mirror anyway, and once you do that, the relative qualities of drives totally fades into background, leaving cost as the main concern.

Re:Buy Seagate!

[Bazouel]

It seems to me that old Maxtor drives are much more reliable than newer ones. I too have a 7 years maxtor drive that is still up and running.

BUT I bought a 200 GB HD from Maxtor in January 2004 and it just died last week ! As you can guess, the one year warranty didn't help make this less painful ...

Re:Buy Seagate!

[Mycroft_VIII]

FWIW I used to go to a particular small shop that sold custom built computers and such untill the owner got offered a really good job just as the cost savings of a diy computer droped low enough to make his margins razor thin.
    Well sometime around 92-94 (IIRC) he posted a big sign saying he no longer carried or recomended conner hard drives, and if asked to order/install one he would do so but you had to take up all warrenty issues directly with conner yourself. Bellow that he had documentation where where he'd spent 10 weeks trying to get a succesfull replacement for one, four round trips with rma hassles followed by conner ingnoring him for the last two weeks (it taking an average of a week of him calling to get each rma #) before finally sending him a check for the drive, with him eating the shipping costs on the returned drives.
    This was meerly the worst one, he said he'd had some kind of hassle with nearly a third of the conners he'd sold sofar that year.

Mycroft

Slashdotting

[Danger Stevens]

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/fc9b34ac4dfe751a4 98b1a1ef5126e30/index.html

Relevant for home users?

[Junior J. Junior III]

I really only care about longevity and reliability anymore. Any drive on the market is going to be big enough to store what I want. They're going to be cheap enough that I can afford them, too. And I'm accustomed to dealing with the speed bottleneck that the hard drive represents. They're getting faster every day anyhow, but I can live with whatever for the most part. It's not like I'm running a commercial database server out of my house.

Cost, capacity, speed, and noise are all good to know about, but if the drive fails on average in just a year or two, you have to answer the question of how do you back up several hundreds of gigabytes, and there aren't many good solutions at the consumer level. RAID1 is one thing, but it's redundancy, still not a true backup.

Re:Relevant for home users?

[timeOday]

RAID1 is one thing, but it's redundancy, still not a true backup.

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 will become more of an issue now that people are keeping personal photo collections and music collections on their computers.

Re:Relevant for home users?

[md27]

What you mean is don't use RAID 1 for backup, which is good, but since RAID anything isn't for backup it's like saying don't use a monitor for backup. RAID 1 does a wonderful job of what it's designed for, keeping a dead drive from ruining your day. If you're worried about deleting stuff, buy 3 drives and run RAID 1 to protect yourself from data loss and run a batch backup everynight to protect yourself from yourself.

Clueless presentation

[spworley]

After you click through the first two ad-cluttered pages, you start to see some results. They're presented in a single bar graph with dark shaded gradients.
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

[Evro]

Slashdot used to be a great place to find obscure cool info, benefiting from millions of people browsing different sites and filtering it so the coolest stuff bubbled to the top. Now it seems to be THE place for new sites to send their articles, as a link from Slashdot = guaranteed ad views. So we get newbie sites trying anything and everything to get their site mentioned on Slashdot, which explains many of the current problems with Slashdot, and the tech news industry in general.

hard driver.

[milktoastman]

They need a 6 mo, 9 mo, and 12 mo head crash test in their evaluations. But then the review wouldn't be cutting edge and fresh by that time, how far? Hard drivers scare me when I load them with loads of data. I's a scared baby when it comes to my data. Back up it often, your data. I know this commity knows this. Computer hackeys abound here.

I just gotta say

[bogie]

And I know nobody is impressed by hard drive space anymore, but 300GB for only $139 truly does boggle the mind. We're at the $500 = one Terabyte point. That's nuts.

Re:I just gotta say

[Profane MuthaFucka]

That's right on schedule. For the same dollar amount, disk space increases about 1000 times in 10 years. In 1995, I bought a 1 gig drive for $500.

In 2015, we'll have Petabyte drives for $500. THAT is nuts.

Re:I just gotta say

[bloo9298]

In 2015, we'll have Petabyte drives for $500. THAT is nuts.

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").

Re:I just gotta say

[GigsVT]

We've never had a problem filling space in the past.

Think of it this way. It's 1995 and you get a Terabyte drive dropped in your lap. You'd never be able to fill it up with the applications that were out then.

What are you going to do, download every application in AOL's software library? On every BBS? You still couldn't fill it.

The point is the applications grow with the space.

Re:I just gotta say

[Anonymous Coward]

I could have filled a Terabyte hard drive then; ATI TV card. :)

Never mind that ATI sucks nowadays. but anyhoo. . .

Re:I just gotta say

[jcnnghm]

In 2015, we'll have Petabyte drives for $500. THAT is nuts.

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").

Think of all that porn, maybe even in 3D by then.

Re:I just gotta say

[Anonymous Coward]

"We're at the $500 = one Terabyte point."

Makes me laugh.

    On one hand downloading "pirated" information on public networks is "evil"--- and on the other --- buy this 60GB Apple Ipod and 300 GB hard drive?

      There are few people on this planet that would actually require this capacity if all their material was paid for so I guess it can be argued it is analogous to buying a corvette for looks and status (rather than speeding) ...but then I remember computers aren't really good for picking up chicks with.

    Confused citizen

Re:I just gotta say

[atam]

What if you have a collection of 500 CDs and you want to rip them and put them uncompressed into a computer to use as audio server? You do need a 300 GB+ hard drive and it is completely legally.

Re:I just gotta say

[Anonymous Coward]

------------
"What if you have a collection of 500 CDs and you want to rip them and put them uncompressed into a computer to use as audio server? You do need a 300 GB+ hard drive and it is completely legally. "
------------

Let's examine your statement closely because this was the point I was making exactly.

      Let's say the typical CD has around 70 minutes worth of content (I really don't know the average so bear with me). The original sampling rate is 44.1 Khz at 1378 bps. Now MP3 are lossy so I'm going to be extremely generous and say the person is a complete audiophile and rips at 320Kbps (this is extremely generous statement as most stuff on the Internet is less than 128Kbps)

70min x 60sec x 320000bps = 1,344,000,000 bits or 168 MB per CD

Now you said 500 CDs right?

168 x 500 = 84 GB

      So even in your scenario (which requires a rabid music consumer-- which only a very small percentage of people can actually afford or be assumed) you still only needed a 120 GB Hard drive tops.

      Now I gave you the best case scenario. If we go with the 128kbps bit rate and 60 minutes of content which is probably more realistic.

(60 x 60 x 128000 ) / 8 * 500 = 57.6 MB/CD
57.6x 500 = 28.6 GB

84 - 28.6 GB storage is the range for your hypothetical audiophile. I don't know how many CDs a typical consumer buys but no doubt it is probably far less than that.

Conclusion:

      Sure, some music nut (or audio technician) could buy the 3000 or so CDs (@$15 a pop) necessary to justify a 300 GB hard drive but this probably represents a fraction (of a fraction) of a single percentage of those that buy Ipods or 300GB hard drives to store only music on.

Under virtually no conceivable LEGAL real world consumer use of music is this storage capacity remotely necessary. It's very simple math and easily provable.

Therefore my original statement is still accurate---That there are conflicting signals from our society and lawmakers. They obviously don't have a handle on the problem despite all the moralistic name calling and posturing.

    The sooner the world comes to it's senses about what happens to information that becomes available on public networks (legal or illegal) the sooner we can go about creating laws that work and are in touch with reality-- rather than pretending "pirates" are "stealing" while the average good ol consumers is not.

      The industry in their usual short term thinking created this monster themselves. I can't see how we can go back without completely infringing on everyone's privacy now.

For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[bigwavejas]

*The following is an opinion, not fact, so please take with a grain of salt as it is meant for discussion*

I personally would have little/ no use for a SATA drive of that capacity. I think if people followed good practice for removing old or unused programs/ games they wouldn't have the need for something 300+. The only thing I could see using this for might be for archiving or storing mass music/ video, but even then, is it really the best media for doing so?

Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[Silver Sloth]

The only thing I could see using this for might be for archiving or storing mass music/ video, but even then, is it really the best media for doing so?

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 could get was 1.4Mb floppies and 20Mb hard drives everything fitted in just nicely. Now we have 80Gb hard drives and 512Mb Memory sticks and everythign fits in just nicely. Next year we'll have.......

Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[Neoprofin]

Were you suggesting tape drives? CDs? DVDs?

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 archiving operations, and they stand to lose a lot of work from corruptions, but if you keep the heat low and the workload managable (and of course maintain backups) everything should be fine.

Of course I miss a lot of tech development if I leave the house for a few days.

Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[TheRaven64]

DV footage is big. 10GB/hour roughly. If the home user has a video camera, then they can fill a 300GB drive with 30-hours of footage. I have an external 300GB drive I use for video editing, and it is full - I could probably free up some space deleting the raw DV footage of things I've edited, but I never know when I might want some of it again. Once BluRay becomes common, I will probably start using BD-R for that kind of thing, but right now hard disks are the easiest way of storing it.

Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[Davorama]

pr0n jokes aside, I can see where I could suck up most of 300GB with some 'high quality' home movies of the kids at various school performances. A nice new digital twist to the tried and true torturing of visiting relatives via amature video.

Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing I could see using this for might be for archiving or storing mass music/ video, but even then, is it really the best media for doing so?

For a MythTV or Windows MCE box, yes it is.

Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[MBGMorden]

I've got bout 470gb in total capacity on my home machine and it's only got about 20gb of free space.

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 just need something quick.

I'm hoping for 5TB drives within the next 10 years :).

Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[Lumpy]

Yup I could use 3 of them for a video project. I could capture as uncompressed AVI instead of a lossy DV2 avi or even worse Mpeg. and if you have a HD camcorder then you need even more space if you are doing 1081i capture even in a lossy DV codec capture.

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?

[forkazoo]

I think it is an excellent medium for archiving my video. I currently have about a half TB online on my main PC. Several hundred GB worth of just video. Strictly speaking, yes, I could get a whole bunch of miniDV tapes or something, and spend god knows how many hours putting all my video on tape, and archiving it. Then what would I get? I cabinet full of tapes. Dammit, why the hell would I want that?

My Hard drives are smaller than tapes would be. They let me get at all my video instantly. They let me manipulate all of it without having to copy back to a HD to bring it online. When I get another big hard drive, I can back it all up easily.

Because, really... Why *wouldn't* you want a complete collection of Doctor Who on your PC? (Mine isn't actually complete yet... I have Peter Davison on, and am in the middle of acquiring the complete Tom Baker. I don't have much of the first three Doctors. And, in point of fact, none at all of the first)

Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[Nasarius]

The only thing I could see using this for might be for archiving or storing mass music/ video, but even then, is it really the best media for doing so?

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?

[pilgrim23]

My Mac G4 is 80 200 200 200, My G5 is 80, 250 (Sata), I also have 2 Firewire enclosures (200) and one 120 on a spare ATA card on a old Beige G3. The PC(s) have a stack of 40s and 1 80 in there (I would need to look to be sure how many, I forget). All the 200s above were Maxtor since Fry's was running a special on them, The SATA drives are WD. My PC(s)' drives are a mix of Seagate, WD, Maxtor, and I think I have a Quantum in there too.. My luck has been that all drives of all vendors behave about the same; keep them cool,and don't bump them around and they work; don't, and they they fail. As you can see above I have some 1.6tb of storage...and ...I am almost out of room. I NEED those 1tb drives like yesterday!

Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[yamla]

Heh. Here I am, thinking of upgrading my home system from 800 gigs to 1020 gigs with one of these suckers. Pull out an 80 gig drive, slot in a 300.

I use mine to store Doctor Who episodes. But I have a girlfriend so I'm not a totally lost case.

Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[mjeppsen]

I have an external 300GB drive I use for video editing, and it is full - I could probably free up some space deleting the raw DV footage of things I've edited, but I never know when I might want some of it again.

Any decent NLE will allow you to offline DV files, but retain timecode capture info. You can offline the files (deleting them from the hard disk), and recapture from the original DV tapes as needed in the future. This works automatically and perfectly, as long as you don't have timecode breaks on the DV source tapes.
This is an example of a fairly common workflow among the editors I know;
Capture, edit, export, burn.
Offline files, and burn CD-R archive (or two) of the project files and any associated titles, audio, and other media used in the project.
Store the DV tapes and CD-R archive in a cool, dry place.

Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[Fweeky]

Well, I don't know, who is this mysterious "home user" you speak of? If it's my mum, then no; she gets on fine with an old 20G Seagate. If it's me.. well, yeah, kinda. Movies, TV shows, music, games, applications; there's a lot to be said for having all this on live storage, accessable by opening a directory on a network share instead of hunting through piles of DVDs and CDs, only to find the one you want has a scratch, or a hole in it (yay unstable optical media).

If a drive's getting old, or too small to be useful, transfering its contents to another drive is simple; doing the same with a pile of 100 DVDR's isn't quite so trivial. Then there's all the flexibility RAID gives you; bigger drives means you can have more redundancy and still have big-enough logical volumes. What media could be better?

Re:For the home user, is a 300+ necessary?

[Dolly_Llama]

My Hard drives are smaller than tapes would be. They let me get at all my video instantly. They let me manipulate all of it without having to copy back to a HD to bring it online. When I get another big hard drive, I can back it all up easily.

I get around this by having my video on the hard drive and my software on tape.

LOAD "*",8,1

Ways to use that extra space:

[ShaniaTwain]

Get several of these!

-make a personal backup of 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:

[TheRaven64]

300GB is less than 30 hours of DV footage. I was amazed how quickly I filled up the 320GB drive I use for video editing. The 80GB drive in my laptop, however, seems more than large enough for everything else.

Re:Ways to use that extra space:

[Anonymous Coward]

Any post that mentions pr0n and Shania Twain at the same time....oh....I got some cleaning up to do.

Re:Ways to use that extra space:

[QuietLagoon]

How does one back up that much data?

Re:Ways to use that extra space:

[mihalis]

HDV (high-def digital video) is even worse. I got a powermac with a 400GB drive about a month ago. A few video projects later, it's half-full. Now there is even a more affordable consumer high-def Sony Handycam (see this), more and more people will discover that modern hard drives are just not big enough.

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 struggled to edit a 40-minute high-def rock gig project on my powerbook (60GB hard drive). I had to slim down to a minimum of other stuff just to hold the necessary media files.

Going from something linear like a continuous recording being turned into a DVD, towards a composite edit (pulling in footage from multiple events) only God knows how much storage I'm going to need.

Blatant plug : I am doing these projects for a friends band Made Out Of Babies - They Rock!

Re:Ways to use that extra space:

[ShaniaTwain]

How does one back up that much data?

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.

Re:Ways to use that extra space:

[Mastadex]

4. PROFIT!!!

Is that the limit, then?

[Prospero's Grue]

After all, 300GB should be enough for everybody.

Right?

Re:Is that the limit, then?

[aliquis]

and to make things worse all of the drives except the seagate 7200.8 are "very" old ones.

Roundup?

[Junior J. Junior III]

Did the editors or the submitter even read the article? The article is just a review of the Maxtor 300GB drive. It's hardly a comparison of several models and manufacturers.

Re:Roundup?

[fredistheking]

Exactly. Hardly a comparison at all. There is only one drive that is comparable in size (Hitachi 7k500). With 400GB drives available from Both Western Digital and Seagate you think they should have been included in the roundup.

Re:Roundup?

[Hack Jandy]

What's even more pathetic is the submitter WROTE the article... Hopefully the "review" generated some good ad traffic since that will be the last time I visit them.

HJ

Newegg link $139 for 300GB drive

[bogie]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16822144359&ATT=Hard+Drives&CMP=OTC-pr1c3grabb3r

large volume raid storage

[smoondog]

These 300GB drives should be very nice for SATA large volume hw raid arrays. A 12 way 3ware card gives a 3.6 TB array, not bad for $5g. (We have several large arrays that are used for storing data. Not good for web or file serving but great to store data that is used routinely.)

Re:large volume raid storage

[Gothmolly]

I'd say that 5 billion USD is a lot for 3.6 TB.

Oh wait, did you mean $5k ?? Well, call me "-1, Pedantic".

Well... I'm not impressed by 16MB of cache.

[Z00L00K]

It shouldn't be that hard for the manufacturers to be able to install more cache memory, like 64MB or even 128MB. The 8MB disks has been around for about two years now. NCQ has been around for a while too...

The most interesting thing on that page was a link to a hard disk encryption software in an ad.

Compare it with the Seagate Cheetah 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 I'm comparing two completely different divisions of disks with completely different pricing. My point is that the /. article is a little overrated.

Re:Well... I'm not impressed by 16MB of cache.

[TheRaven64]

I don't really see the advantage of a large cache on the disk. I would much rather have the cache on a 2GB/s connection to the CPU than a 150MB/s one. Bung an extra few hundred MBs of main memory, and you are likely to see more of an improvement than adding a small amount of RAM to the disk - particularly since the main RAM can be used for other things when you are not using it as cache.

Perhaps usernames should be less obvious...

[DigitalReverend]

I find it humorous when a person is obvious who they work for or who they are supporters of. Just look at the opening line.

Maxtorn writes...

Nice username and he submits a story about Maxtor drives. Perhaps we'll get stories from Seagated, AppleJack or Solarister next.

Re:Perhaps usernames should be less obvious...

[Anonymous Coward]

...or Fujidsul, or ToshiBam...

Yea Yea

[Delifisek]

Same sh*t another day.
Fastest yaba daba do, for what ?

No serial Scsi, No 15k rpm, No solid state.

Just same f**ing thing. over and over again...

Just double the cache, put another plate.

We need new tech, consolidation of old ones is just NOT ENOUGH...

Re:Why yes, this is a grammar-nazi post.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Muscle Memory

Plus this is Slashdot and few care to proofread.

PXI buss speed clips perfromance back to IDE

[goombah99]

I'm not an expert on this but I've read that basically all the SATA interfaces whether on the MOBO or in plug-in cards have their throughput limited to no more than IDE by the bus speed.

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:PXI buss speed clips perfromance back to IDE

[Anonymous Coward]

SATA /IS/ IDE. As is PATA. Please learn the difference.

PCI-X is also not limited by the 133MB/sec bus speed of PCI. So the interface *WILL* be utilized.

Re:PXI buss speed clips perfromance back to IDE

[the eric conspiracy]

I've read that basically all the SATA interfaces whether on the MOBO or in plug-in cards have their throughput limited to no more than IDE by the bus speed.

I get better than ATA-133 transfer rates all the time on my SATA RAID 0 system.

If your doing something that eats space,

[KitesWorld]

like video editing on your pc, then there's a real reason to think about capacity.
It can also be a help to artists and the likes (in particular 3d artists) that want all of their previous works on hand, instead of having to hunt through DVD's and the likes to find a particular file.
Also kinda handy if you've got a big sample collection - save's a whole lot of disk swapping if you can just dump it onto a Hdd.

Linux SATA support?

[Cybersonic]

Anyone know the current status of booting from SATA? From what I see so far, it requires a bit of kernel hacking to get the modern distros to boot from one. A major pain actually...

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

No issues in the latest Gentoo Live CD atleast for NForce4 onboard SATA. Had less issues with SATA on the linux install the Windows install just quit because it could not find the SATA drives.

Re:Linux SATA support?

[martok]

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.

Re:Linux SATA support?

[ZagNuts]

Any modern distro will boot from a sata drive. I have been booting from one in Redhat Enterprise for 2 years and I am writing from an Ubuntu install booted from a sata drive.

Re:Linux SATA support?

[Brandybuck]

When I built my current system, two years old now, I was unable to find any Linux distro that would install on it. Frankly I was shocked. FreeBSD had no trouble with my SATA drives. None at all. Which is the opposite one would expect reading the Slashdot FUD.

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 needed SATA on the install CD! The situation has greatly improved, but one still finds commercial distros without SATA support on the install media.

Re:Linux SATA support?

[jagilbertvt]

FC3 and FC4 both install fine to SATA drives. I havent tried FC2 (that I can recall).

Re:Linux SATA support?

[HazE_nMe]

Mandriva 2005LE boots fine from my SATA drive using the 2.6x kernel, so does DesktopBSD.

Re:Linux SATA support?

[Single GNU Theory]

This is good to know.

Last week my Debian-boots-fine-from Maxtor SATA 250GB drive barfed on my /home partition. Why not /var or /tmp, WHY?!?!

I'd had some problems with CD-ripping under Debian, so I thought enough about Fedora Core 4 (I'd run FC2 before switching to Debian, and we run FC3 on a Dell PERC RAID at work just fine) to try installing it again. However, it crashed badly on the sata_sil driver every time.

I probably just have a bad burn of the first install disc, then.

Of course, I would know the answer to that if I didn't reflexively skip the media check option in Fedora installs. D'oh!

Re:Linux SATA support?

[Fweeky]

Yup; FreeBSD's ATA driver supports SATA natively, and the chipset-specific code is light enough that it simply doesn't bother with options for you to specify what chipsets you want supporting.

On the other hand, Linux's ATA driver is on the way out, and it's slowly being replaced by the SCSI-based libata (presumably because Linux's SCSI subsystem is the only one with a half-decent API). Both support some of the same chipsets, and some only work with one of them, which can mean mixed results depending on how your kernel is compiled.

Re:Linux SATA support?

[jagilbertvt]

I seem to recall an issue w/ the sil driver in fc3 x86-64 (the only machine I have /w a sil chip happens to be an athlon 64). The via worked fine (yes the board has 2 seperate sata controllers onboard). I installed FC3/FC$ on an i875 dual xeon board (Asus PC-DL) which has an Intel ICH5 SATA controller (uses the piix driver as I recall, which has it's own issues w/ the ICH5 (due to it supporting multiple SATA/PATA devices)). I haven't tried FC4 on the Athlon machine, though. A friend has installed FC4 on a board w/ Nforce4 chipset without issues, as well.

gl /w installing!

Re:Linux SATA support?

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed SUSE 9.3 on a brand new SATA-only Dell in April, and it "just worked". No compatibility problems whatsoever.

Re:Linux SATA support?

[Anonymous Bullard]

Any modern distro will boot from a sata drive. I have been booting from one in Redhat Enterprise for 2 years and I am writing from an Ubuntu install booted from a sata drive.

Depends on you definition of "modern".

The only way I managed to get Hoary to boot trouble-free was by moving the boot partition to an IDE drive. Both my mobo's built-in SATA chipset and the add-on card were supposedly supported by Garzik's patches but none of the h/w combinations I tried worked with the original Hoary install (which I'd consider to be "modern").

Maybe things have changes in the last month or so, but the last time I looked the SATA patches have taken their sweet time getting into the mainline kernel and various SATA chipsets remain unbootable or problematic even when patched to the max.

Since the latest official releases (Hoary & Mandrake 10.1, actually I even tried FC3) of the top distros based on distrowatch rankings didn't boot here using two different supposedly supported SATA chipsets I'd consider your simplistic claim to be wrong.

I'm glad your setup has worked for two years already but saying that "any modern distro will boot from a sata drive" simply isn't true. Now, if you claimed that by the end of the year most modern distros will boot from a SATA drive just fine I'd probably agree with you, but until all SATA chipsets are actually supported and properly integrated into distros it'd be better to caution users about potential pitfalls instead of making blanket statements.

Re:Linux SATA support?

[Single GNU Theory]

gl /w installing!

Thanks!

I worked out what I'll do. It turns out that a fresh Debian install fixed the main problems I had on my home machine, software-wise. Since my 250GB SATA drive is still under warranty (and the MaxBlast software on its CD gave me a diagnostic code for RMA), I will change that out for a new drive.

Before that happens, though, I'm going to order a new one of the same type so I can use dd_rescue to get my old files back. I think I have a good chance of getting just about everything. Then, once I have a safe backup, I'm going to put the two new 250GB drives into a mirrored RAID setup to protect myself better in the future.

I looked into getting smartd running, but it doesn't look like it can see my SATA drives properly without kernel patching.

It's an object lesson in why you shouldn't make any partitions so big you can't have two of 'em, if you don't have a proper backup solution. :-)

Re:Linux SATA support?

[jagilbertvt]

yeah, smart support is lacking w/ the new libata sata stuff it seems.

Western Digital

[fredistheking]

WD now has 3 year minimum warranty and 5 year for enterprise drives:

http://www.wdc.com/en/company/releases/PressReleas e.asp?release={264FE90B-5808-489E-9DEC-05106E24AD7 9}

Fluff

[fredistheking]

Where is WD? This 'review' seems like fanboy fluff to me. The access time on the Maxtor is the worst of all the drives compared and no where is this mentioned in the conclusion.

For real hard drive reviews try storagereview.com.

Bigfoot

[QMO]

I have an old 2.5GB Quantum Bigfoot that still works.
(FYI: Quantum made the Bigfoot drives that are 5.25" quarter-height. i.e. two fit in a normal 5.35" bay)

I have these drives in an array

[Thaidog]

3000G 16MB cache... works great!

Re:I have these drives in an array

[chris macura]

How much head?

just a little biased . . .

[jonesy16]

". . . but for that money you get 1.5 times the storage capacity (300GB vs 200GB), double the cache memory (16MB vs 8MB), and the performance edge proven by the tests run in this review [over seagate]. Sounds like a good deal to me!"

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. If it were my money, I know where I'd spend it. Decide for yourself I guess.

Some fine points:

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind that there's a "nearline" industrial version of this drive - called the MaXLine III - that has a 5-year warranty. It's designed for nearline storage (greater dependability at a cost of slower access speeds), but has been shown to be one of the best single-user (i.e., desktop) choices. It's not considered a good choice for servers.

I have four of these in a RAID that's housed in a standard PC tower, and can attest to the fact they are fast, quiet, and run cool. Great drives.

Re:Some fine points:

[Lumpy]

dude IDE is not reccoemended in a server in any form.

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 of the SCSI drives is they are 4X the price of the consumer SATA drives. but you get what you pay for.

IDE and SATA are not a choice for anything but a low end low speed/load server.

Re:Some fine points:

[Pranadevil2k]

IDE and SATA are not a choice for anything but a low end low speed/load server.

And of course home users machines >.>

Re:Some fine points:

[jafuser]

You didn't mention the RPM of the drives in this test?

Obviously a 10,000 RPM SCSI drive will kick a 5400 RPM non-NCQ SATA drive anyday. =)

I would like to see a good fair comparison of newest SCSI vs SATA drives.

Re:Some fine points:

[Fweeky]

SATA's excellent where price, STR and space are more important than seek time; this covers plenty of server applications. A couple of 400G SATA drives in RAID-1 is perfect for a backup/log box, and an appserver or webserver which keeps all its working set in memory really isn't going to care if seeks take 9ms instead of 3. For larger arrays, the larger size of SATA drives saves loads in terms of space, power and heat, not to mention array complexity and raw cost.

Sure, most of our servers are SCSI, but (S)ATA fills an important gap. Not every server's IO, or even performance bound.

Re:Some fine points:

[fatcatman]

IDE and SATA are not a choice for anything but a low end low speed/load server.

BS.

http://www.lustre.org/

SAS and SATA

[martok]

Possibly a little ot but I'm curious of what others think of SAS (serial attached SCSI) coming down the pipe. From what I've read, SAS and SCSI are to be interface compatable and though a SATA drive will connect to a SAS controller, the reverse is not the case. I wonder what the case for that is and why they didn't just settle on a single standard when they dropped ATA for SATA. A SAS controller can't be that much more expensive to produce.

SATA is still at 7200 RPM with one exception where 10k and 15k have been out for a number of years now. I wonder why they're maintaining the divide.

Uninteresting

[owlstead]

I'm sorry to say this, but I can hardly find it an interesting review. There are many, many sites that review these kind of drives, so I cannot see this warrant a special article all by itself.

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 - which is a lie since you can easily test both - he just does not have a SATA-300 interface ready)
- no testing of RAID
- "it is probably less noisy than the others"

I thought that a price of 48 cents per GB is now pretty common. No need to stress *that*. I'd rather have some more info like spinup times, testing of the SMART interface, power mgmt and how it performes after being driven over by a car.

Self review?

[Call Me Black Cloud]

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!!"

Re:Self review?

[DeGem]

Well it is a funny movie if you enjoy basic crass humor

MTBF? Maxtor? Ha!

[poptones]

I have owned five in the last three years or so and every last one of them has died while under warranty. The two most recent failures were the very fashionable two platter 6Y160 drives (which I, like a fool, explicitly sought out) and the first one died within six months. At the time they didn't have a bootable ISO of their software on the site, either, it was "run windows and do this test or no RMA for you" so the damn thing sat on the shelf until about a month ago when the SECOND "new" drive started losing data and I was forced to act.

The one upside is they returned to me 250GB drives (it seems the only difference in the 2 platter 120-250 drives is software) and they actually seem a little quieter than when they were new. I bit the bullet and put them into a RAID5 wih a newish Seagate 160 so now I have about a half TB of "protected" storage and a warranty that begins expiring about a year from next December. Will these two actually make it past that date without going back yet again? I don't expect them to.

I added a 7 volt fan in front of them and that dropped the temp about ten degrees, but the Maxtors still output about twice the heat of the (slightly quieter) Seagate (even with the fan the temp difference is ~5 degrees). If these drives had not been "free" (of course I paid >$200 for them) I would be running three Seagates now... and as the Maxtors die (again) that's what will replace them. I'll never buy another Maxtor.

300 GB too small

[Danuvius]

I have a 320 GB drive now which, formatted with ReiserFS, gives 300 GB usable space. It is nice and roomy... but ultimately already too small for me.

How long before 1 TB capacity storage will become affordable for home desktop computers? Not having money to throw around (and having a DVD writer) I couldn't bring myself to spend more than $400 CAD (after taxes) on a hard drive... even if it is a 1 TB one.

Maybe in 2 years? I sure hope! Of course... by that time, 1 TB will be once again not quite enough. But perhaps by then, I will be able to backup onto 200+ MB next generation DVD discs. That would help too.

Re:300 GB too small

[Mechcozmo]

Wow! DVDs are going to be over 200 Megabytes!?! I must have missed the dupe story on that one! Just think of all the video that 200MB can hold!

Re:300 GB too small

[Danuvius]

I think both BluRay and HD-DVD *have been made with enough layers* to achieve such capacity. Of course, "have been made" does not mean it will actually get produced as a reasonably priced and genuinely useful consumer product... but there is always hope. And sooner or later we'll get there, I'm sure.

For me, it's Seagate. Hands down.

[mjh49746]

The 7200.8 has excellent desktop performance, a 5 year warranty, and a fair price. You would be a fool not to consider one in your system. I'm getting two. Just do your regular backups or set up a mirror array and don't worry about it. Seagate drives will run forever, from my expirence at least. Just don't expect me to put a Maxtor in my machine or in anyone else's. They're junk. I went through enough of them in a short period of time to avoid them like the plague.

$500 to rent a TB

[poptones]

What are you going to use to back it up? Because I'll just about guarantee you that if you are counting on three Maxtors to provide that TB you ain't gonna have it for long.

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.

Open source hard disk encryption

[Mustang Matt]

There's an open source program called truecrypt that seems to work on the same principal as the one in your add. I've been using it for a while now and it works great.

BS

[Gates82]

This review is extremely bias. WD drives are missing from the review, and both Seagate and Hitachi make 300 gig SATA 150 drives. Why compare the 500 and 200 gig models? Also the 500 gig hitachi comes in SATA3, lets see that stacked against the 150's.

--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?

Re:BS

[dwayner79]

Ali... without a doubt!
HSR

Sarge will even do SATA software raid

[Mustang Matt]

I have some cheap servers that have SATA "raid" cards in them which are nothing more than adaptec chipsets that might do a little but of accelleration with the right software drivers.

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

[nmos]

Even if the Linux drivers supported the "raid" features of you controller it wouldn't buy you any speed so why worry about it?

Never Maxtor again

[dalleboy]

Bought an external Maxtor OneTouch II 300GB, filled it with files, deleted the original files from my other HDDs and 3 weeks later the Maxtor drive crashed, and took down my FireWire and USB2 hub on my computer. I got a new drive of the warranty but all my pr0n was lost!

SATA is GREAT for Storage

[LazloToth]

Well, if you buy a real RAID5-capable card - - one that does the command processing - - SATA is a great foundation for print, file, and web servers. Take the current line of 3Ware SATA controllers, for instance. With an 8-port card, you can set up a mirror for your OS and have 6 slots left for a good RAID5 setup. Add hot-swap drawers and you can build yourself a mighty fast terrabyte of storage with excellent fault tolerance, and you can do it quite cheaply. Use 5 drives for the RAID5 and you can use that last port for a BIG drive that can be used for quick backups to disk (in addition to tape, of course). I'm sold on SATA for applications that don't absolutely demand SCSI performance and features.

Re:SATA is GREAT for Storage

[jagilbertvt]

This is my current project. I'm using a 3ware 9500s-12mi card in an e7501 board w/ dual 1.6ghz lv xeons and 2GB of ram. Still need to find a decent case to house this.. along w/ some "cheap" drives. I'll probably use a standard PATA drive for the OS, as I have some smaller ones hanging around (20-30gb).

Re:SATA is GREAT for Storage

[LazloToth]

Wow - - that's going to be a very nice box. I don't know if it has all the space you want, but I went with the BEAUTIFUL black aluminum case from Silverstone http://www.silverstonetek.com/products-tj06.htm. This is the fourth case I've bought from Silverstone, and, like all the others, it's simply a pleasure to work with. Great machining and finish, unusually well engineered. Doesn't hurt that they're nice on the eyes, too. I used Lian-Li aluminum drive drawers to finish it off. My drives are 250G Seagate 7200 rpm units.

I've got an abacus that still works!

[b00m3rang]

Of course it doesn't put out any heat, and has nowhere near the data storage capacity as modern hard drives, but while we're comparing apples and oranges...

Changes

[jgoemat]

Using the 540 megabyte Maxtor drive you bought 10 years ago to gauge the reliability of their current drives isn't wise. The design of course has changed a lot as would have their production facilities.

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 250gb maxtor drives fail on me. I now have just two good drives (one more external and one of the 160gb ones) out of five for a 6 month period.

When I called Dell support, they sent me Seagate drives instead. I'm only guessing here, but they may have had so many bad Maxtors that they got tired of replacing them over and over.

Re:Changes

[calibanDNS]

Just to be clear, the 540MB drive isn't the only drive I'm using for reference. I also have 5GB, 20GB, and 160GB drives from Maxtor that are performing very well. I consider the 5GB old in terms of hard drives, and some poeple would say that the 20GB is old too. At any rate, from the 4 drives that I've got (covering over 10 years of Maxtor's product line) I haven't had a single problem. The WDs I've had fail on me ranged from a 1.2GB to a 40GB, so I feel that I gave them a fair chance before swearing them off.

As for Dell sending you a different drive, I doubt that it had anything to do with the failure rate of a particular brand. When I worked tech support for a university, we had a Dell support contract for all of our office and student lab machines and got in replacement drives at least 3 times a month. It often seemed that they switched drives on a weekly basis; I think they just buy and ship whatever they can get the best deal on at the time.

Re:Changes

[UttBuggly]

Acronymn of the day C.O.E.S. Which is Coefficient Of Expansion Syndrome. I started building Novell servers in 1982 with DCB (Disk Coprocessor Boards) then "real" SCSI boards and drives. I handled literally thousands of drives from a 10MB (yes, 10 megabytes) Shugart box that Radio Shack sold for a mere $5K to the multi-terabyte racks of Seagate UltraSCSI drives I play with at work. What I've found is that most any drive will work for years and years if setup properly. In the "olden days", that meant running Novell's Compsurf for 3-4 days on your drives before loading the OS. Of course, you had to pull the bad block table taped to the drive off and manually pre-enter those before running. That was always fun. The deal with COES comes an engineering meeting with IBM hard drive folks in 1984. The presentation stated that every physical mechanism has a COE. Simply, as the drive heats up, the media expands and the drive geometry is altered. The drive logic deals with this pretty well and most people have zero awareness that the drive may have just had to re-read 40-50 sectors to load that Word file. COES occurs when OS, data, porn,etc. are written to a "cold" drive. As the drive heats up in normal service, everything on the disk has literally moved a tad due to COE. This increases the error correction use and runs the drive harder than it needs to. SO, for every new drive or system, the simple cure is to run the beast for a minimum of 1 hour in an environment that is extremely close to how it will "live" day-to-day. Then, FDISK, format, load, and go. You reduce the overall lifetime seeks and reads, the drive runs cooler, your pimples clear up, you find a girlfriend who loves to give head, and world peace breaks out. Easy, huh?

Re:Changes

[greg1104]

Whoa, you've even gone all the way up to their 160GB model? Sheesh, with your data set, you might as well be extrapolating based on who made the best stone tablets.

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 period their drives were consistantly the cheapest/GB on the market and I think that's not a coincidence.

As several people have suggested, the issues Maxtor drives have seem to be a direct result of how hot the drives run; their heat dispersion techniques are just not effective for larger capacity models. Even looking at the obviously pro-Maxtor review that's the subject of this discussion, you can see how hot it and the Hitachi drive (and we all know how reliable Deathstar designs are, right?) run compared with the similar Seagate models. This particular review makes this hard to conclude, because of the size differences, but similar reviews where the capacities were matched also show the latest Seagate designs are much cooler than Maxtor or Hitachi (I'm not sure about Western Digital, because we're talking about drives that some people think are reliable here).

Let's see, now I have to throw out my anecdotal experience, right? There was a year long period not too long ago where I bought a 200GB and then two 250GB drives from Maxtor, spaced evenly throughout the year (mid-2002 to mid-2003 I think), so certainly not all from one batch. When the first one failed, I was happy because the replacement was a 250GB model so I had a matched set. But after the day where both the original 250GB drives died, even though one of them wasn't even plugged in and running at the time, it stressed even my meticulous backup methods to recover from that. Total result: my failure rate on the Maxtor drives is 133%. How did I get over 100%? Well, one of the 250GB drives that was RMA'd and replaced with a refurbished unit, which just last week has now died itself.

During that same era and since, I've bought around 8 Seagate drives, most of them 160GB models. They were a little smaller than the Maxtor units from the same era, but I haven't seen Seagate's RMA page yet.

And if we're going to swap university tech support stories, in later 2003 I worked at a school where all the freshmen had 250GB Maxtor drives similar to mine in their machines. The guy running the hardware part of their support deparment tells me he's never seen a failure rate like this in the ten years he's been doing that work; if you said "Maxtor" near him he'd jump like he'd been poked.

Anyway, regardless of which war stories you believe, the fact is that the hotter a drive runs, the more likely it is to fail quickly. If you care about reliability, you should always buy the drives that run the coolest. And that's sure not Maxtor or Hitachi right now, but instead Seagate. To even hesitate on that decision, there would need to be a compelling, recent body of evidence condemning Seagate's reliability record combined with an outstanding and also recent period where Maxtor did better, and I'm not seeing either of those right now, but rather the exact opposite on both sides.

Re: Backup

[Ultronator]

What are you going to use to back it up?...

A backup drive of course

Maxtor drives in general

[Overshard]

When I have previously used Maxtor drives they have always failed on me in about a year or less. Maybe i'm just getting the bad drives and everyone else is getting the good ones :-/.

Re:Maxtor drives in general

[tyahand]

No, it's not just you. Maxtor sucks.

Another drive of course

[SuperKendall]

Simple, a backup drive. Just buy one a year to backup a Raid array with, you'll only use it a few times a year (perhaps once a week) and then after that you can shelve it, should last far longer than most other media. And even if it were to die on you in some way data recovery services could extract the data from the HD far easier than most other media as well (I've never heard of CD recovery services being as effective and if a tape shreds you are going to have a hell of a time getting stuff off it).

C is for Cookies?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy Batman!

This friggin "article" is borderline spam.
That site spit no less than 18 fuckin ad-cookies at me!!!

Yes, I had to click "No" **18** times.

I didn't even look at the article after that shit, just closed it right away.

Can we please stop posting spam to slashdot?

The point being...

[poptones]

It's not $500 for a TB because you are adding a second hard drive to the mix. what you describe is basically a RAID1 with the "redundant drive" stored on a shelf. If you are going to back up a 1TB 3 disc RAID on those portable drives then you need three of them, too or you need a redundant computer to house your redudnant RAID.

Any of that stuff costs a lot more than 500 bucks.

Re:The point being...

[rale, the]

Whats wrong with RAID-5? Most home users arent storing a TB of mission-critical data, so being protected from any single drive failing should be plenty. That way you're only talking about 1 extra disk, instead of 3 - its still more then $500, but its not exactly double it either.

My Maxtor just died recently

[tomzyk]

I bought a Maxtor 120Gig drive about a year ago and it already died on me a little over a week ago. I had it full. FULL! And it died on me.

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 projects... hell, I just realized that I think my resume was on that drive too.

I've always used my newest harddrive as my backup drive, thinking that it would be the most reliable. guess I was wrong.
"... all your eggs in one basket" and all that... rassinfrassin.... :-(

(And the porn! Dear God, all of that porn... GONE!!!)

Re:My Maxtor just died recently

[runderwo]

How did it die? I just went through my third 200GB Maxtor (all warranty replaced). I used dd_rhelp wrapper for dd_rescue to obtain as much data as possible. I still ended up with thousands of lost+found files, but it's better than nothing.

Re:My Maxtor just died recently

[pla]

Does anyone know anything about resurrecting data from a dead Maxtor? Seriously!

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 like a pretty common point of failure - Try sticking it in the freezer overnight (no joke!), and see if you can get it to spin up one last time, just long enough to copy everything important off it (And make damned sure you know what you want, and in what order you value it,, because you'll only get 15 minutes tops out of the drive this way).

Did you have a head crash? In that case, you don't really have any data left to recover. A professional recovery house could probably get 90% of it back, for a few grand, but the average Joe should consider it a total loss.


I've always used my newest harddrive as my backup drive, thinking that it would be the most reliable. guess I was wrong.

If you already have a well-organized system of backups, you might want to consider an offline backup-backup... With HDD space so cheap, you can set yourself up with a cheap Linux box with a TB of space for under $500. Turn it on, mirror your live backup system, then shut it back down... Repeat whenever you have enough new stuff that it would hurt too much to lose it.



As an aside, to keep this OT, I've never had a problem with the DiamondMax line from Maxtor. They supposedly had a crap run back in the late 90's, the ones Dell used in all their boxes (wouldn't know personally, I don't buy name brand PCs), but I have half a dozen (exactly) DiamondMaxes running, including two 10s, a 9+, and three from before that (don't have them visible and not about to shutdown a machine just to check, but definitely pre-9). Not a single failure yet.

Re:My Maxtor just died recently

[jpop32]

This is the first harddrive that has ever died on me in 15+ years of owning my own personal computer(s).

You lucky bastard. I've had at least a dozen drives die on me over the years (just this week a 30GB Maxtor, data retrieval attempt scheduled for next week :-)).

Does anyone know anything about resurrecting data from a dead Maxtor?

It heavily depends on the actual problem with the disk. If it's only bad sectors, you can trivially extract everything but the damaged sectors (in other words, save 99.9% of the data). Fried electronics or spin-up problem could be corrected (board replacement and drive freezing). If the head or the motor is damaged, data can still be retrieved, but that usually costs an arm and a leg per GB, so that's not quite feasible for lost porn. :-)

Anyways, whatever OS you run, find a SMART utility that will monitor drives health. Modern drives internally monitor dozens of parameters during boot and operation, and will usually show warning signs months in advance of the actual failure. Running a check at each boot will give you plenty of time to prepare for impending disaster.

"... all your eggs in one basket" and all that... rassinfrassin.... :-(

Exactly. Hardware RAID card, 3 or 4 drives in RAID-5 and SMART monitoring should be baseline for data security nowadays. Who can afford to lose 200-300GB of data?

Re:My Maxtor just died recently

[squoozer]

As well as the freezer trick for bearings I have found a _light_ tap with the handle of a screw driver directly over the bearings can help. If you do freeze it make sure you put it in a plastic bag first.

As for Maxtor drives being reliable I almost only use Maxtor now (DiamondMax). I have had a couple of really olg drives die on me (sub 1GB so they were pretty old) but the only one that has died that didn't last as long as I hoped was an IBM DeathStar erm DeskStar. Absolute pile of... well you get my drift.

A story to brighten your day though. One of the Maxtor drives I have is, I believe, nearly indistructable. It's a 20GB IIRC drive that I got about 5 years ago. One day while swaping it to another machine I dropped it. Doh. The problem was as it fell the underside clipped the case and took of a surface mount. The mount looked like it was toast as it had sheared off so that there was no leg to re-attach it (it was one of the larger surface mounts). I carefully filed down the edge of the mount to expose some of the leg that is inside the case and soldered it back on. The drive still works.

Re:My Maxtor just died recently

[magnusk]

Does it not spin up? Drive bearings seem like a pretty common point of failure - Try sticking it in the freezer overnight (no joke!), and see if you can get it to spin up one last time, just long enough to copy everything important off it (And make damned sure you know what you want, and in what order you value it,, because you'll only get 15 minutes tops out of the drive this way).

If the problem is stiction, I think you can probably expect a lot more than 15 minutes out of it. Once you get it spinning again, it should be fine at least until you next try to spin it up.

I had a hard drive refuse to spin up recently, and I tried all sorts of tricks to get it going again, including putting it in the freezer overnight. Eventually I had nothing else left to try, so I got out a screwdriver, and removed all the screws. Umm, except one (the one over the axis of the spindle, under a sticker), but I didn't know that until later.

I wound up just levering the case open, breaking it in the process, and spanging my screwdriver off of one of the platters. Platters make a really nice ringing sound.

I turned the platters by hand, then hooked it up to a PC, still with the case off, no anti-dust precautions, and booted up from another drive.

Then I copied all the files over to the other disk. Watching a hard drive arm in action is pretty cool. You should try it. With a dead HD.

In the end, I only lost three files off of the whole drive. The platters were colourless, so my girlfriend has them now - she uses them as mirrors. They are really top quality.

And the various magnets are now on my fridge. Get the magnets for the arm, they are really powerful. But be careful, you can easily nip some skin off with them.

Bad comparison...

[cfsmp3]

From TFA:

Even though one reference drive was capable of SATA-300 speeds, all tests were conducted on a SATA-150 interface for the sake of parity. Comparing apples to apples, the SATA-150 performance of the Maxtor drive was the best.

So testing a drive below its maximum speed is apple to apples?

Why? Its pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

"Now I like a drive I can use in more than way"

yeah in theory, but in practice, a drive is installed in a machine and used. You aren't swapping between SATA and IDE interfaces.

So you spend a lot of money to support a theoretical capability (theoretical in the sense that you'll only use it in theory), and the drive will be either broken or obsolete in 3 years anyway. So might as well buy what you need with the interface you need.

I'm not criticizing you, because on the surface, I agree with you, but people aren't taking drives and moving them around, particularly since there's no use for it... it its internal, I'll want to reformat the drive to use it in a different machine. And if I want to move data, I'll put it in an external case with a USB or Firewire (or both!) and use it to move data.

But internal with both interfaces? Nah.

Clarification

[SuperKendall]

Although I personally prefer Raid 0 keeping an extra drive on the shelf as you started with, there's nothing wrong with having a second set of four disks (it would take four drives for a TB of storage, not three) that you back up to once a week.

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.

How times change

[tkrotchko]

It wasn't that long ago that Maxtor was considered the best and Seagates were called "Sea-crates" and considered the worst.

TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy annoying advertising, Batman! I won't visit any sites that use Adlinks.

SATA "Performance"

[pestilence669]

I own an older 9GB IBM Ultra Wide SCSI hard drive. The drive boasts an access time below 5ms. As anyone serious about performance knows, a hard drive's access time is an enormous factor. Read and write performance tends to increase exponentially with lower access times (non-sequential operations). The difference between 9ms and 5ms is deceptively large. I haven't come across any hard drive as fast as my IBM for nearly a decade. To witness it in person, specs aside, is a miracle to behold. I shit you not.

When I sometimes come across articles about SATA or SATA peripherals, I keep reading about the "performance" that SATA brings to the table. Not much can be said about the differences between IDE and SATA regarding bandwidth, they are nearly the same. I still don't know what all the hype is about. Modern hard drives don't even come close to saturating an ATA-133 bus. Burst (cache) speeds don't count. Without RAID, you'll never hit the upper limits anyway. Modern hard drives don't even have access times to justify a lower latency. Sure SATA scales better, but who cares? For the time being, SATA is ATA with new clothes.

My love of SCSI aside, IDE is almost always faster in terms of raw performance. SCSI shines in RAID configurations or with multiple devices (five or more). If all you need is one drive on a Linux server, IDE wins hands down. IDE is also free from the nightmares of SCSI termination and ninety+ connector types. My attraction to SCSI comes from the availability of high performance hard drives. No self respecting manufacturer would release a high-speed drive to the budget market. In the 90's, the best drives were exclusively SCSI and they still are.

When SATA was announced, I hoped that it would offer the advantages of SCSI with the simplicity and cost of IDE... a replacement to both. How wrong I was. Sure, the bandwidth is higher and the connectors are much more sexy. I hate ribbon cables and 68-pin connectors just like anyone else. Even the technology behind the interface is sound, but the manufacturers haven't taken it seriously. The best drives are still exclusive to SCSI. The best servers don't have SATA. SATA is neither the absolute replacement to IDE nor the successor to SCSI. It's been positioned as some bastard to fill the gap between the two.

Now that digital photography, music, and video have finally become commonplace, the focus has been placed on increased storage capacity. Performance has taken a back seat and will for some time. There has always been a trade-off between the two, they are mutually exclusive. SATA solves this in no way. Low-end consumer hard drives that would normally be released with an ATA interface are simply offering SATA if they want to be seen as "high performance." Even the new Maxtor DiamondMax 300GB drive, is offered in a comparable ATA-133 model. Hitachi sells a drive that offers SATA-300, not because it can physically transfer data that fast, but because it sounds good.

We had this problem in the SCSI world too. There was SCSI, Fast SCSI, Wide SCSI, Ultra SCSI, Ultra Wide SCSI, Ultra2 SCSI, Ultra2 Wide SCSI, Ultra3 SCSI / 160, Ultra-320 SCSI, and Ultra-640 / Fast-320. The thing is, they are backward and forward compatible. The oldest drives work with the newest controllers and the oldest controllers work with the newest drives. The bus speed is very useful if you use RAID, made more feasible since the wide variations of SCSI support up to 15 devices per controller. SCSI advances have been more about performance and less about marketing (UDMA-33, UDMA-66, UDMA-100, UDMA-133).

Admirers of SATA should shut up already. It's only a nominal increase over IDE in performance. The hard drives you can buy are exactly the same as one would expect of the low-end / IDE market. Even though SATA may be technologically superior in every way to IDE, what's happening is no better than putting a SCSI interface on a slow IDE drive. I've learned that you can use SATA drives on SCSI controllers. Why? That's exactly the same stupidity I'm referring to... the combination of the extremely budget conscience with the high-end.

SATA will never be "high performance" unless SATA drives become "high performance."

Re:Why yes, this is a grammar-nazi post.

[fbjon]

About your sig:

I looked in RFC 2822 but couldn't find anything specific about + characters in the address. What's the deal?

SATA Speed

[Jambon]

Could someone explain to me why the speed increments of SATA just don't seem to be anywhere near the speed increments of the hard drives themselves? It just seems with perpendicular recording and holographic storage on the horizon that there should be an interface that gives you the bandwidth of RAM or something. Again, I'm sure there are good reasons for why hard drive interfaces are so much slower than RAM (obviously hard drives are slower, but I was thinking of more room to grow).

Slashdot's advertising

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe Slashdot still accepts posts from this 'Bigbruin' guy. These are normal hardware reviews that are found at any hardware review site. There is nothing special and the editors should start doing their job.

Quit posting this crap.

Reliability

[WalksOnDirt]

http://www.storagereview.com/ is now trying to put reliability data in their reviews. Not sure how well it works, but it at least seems better than nothing. They have not reviewed this drive yet, but you can check out how some recent drives from all the major manufacturers are doing.

But 300 GB is really 286 GB

[Anonymous Coward]

Where'd the other 14 GB go?

Completely Anecdotal Evidence + Bad Comparison.

[Quikyn]

You had a Maxtor 540MB that had no problems. What sizes were the other drives? If they were more modern drives, they would have been FAR more susceptible to heat. While much R&D goes into improving capacity without side effects, a lot of the progress has been increasing density (especially beyond the 8-10GB barrier) while it has been reducing the stability of the drives.

Older drives were much more dependable, newer drives have fancy shock absorption and parking mechanisms. But it's hard to escape heat unless you add a $20-50 cooling system on to the drive, which stops it from being competitively priced. Competition was really fierce a couple of years back, and the drives stopped just being unreliable, they started being melted bricks.

So you had three Western Digitals that died. It might have been faulty drives, it's more likely it was your box. The same has happened with modern Seagates, Maxtors (I think Maxtor had a very bad track record in their early 80GB days, but I have no reference) and all the other brands. 80-120GB 7200rpm SATA Drives came on the market at what seemed insanely cheap prices, onboard SATA raids were available, people would stack them on top of each other just like they had done with all previous drives they ever owned, and failure rates skyrocketed.

There are other complicating factors, for instance early Seagate SATA's were running too fast which made the heat problem worse. But the conclusion to your statement is the same, dead drives.

So were your WD's 540MB or 80GB drives?

Re:Completely Anecdotal Evidence + Bad Comparison.

[calibanDNS]

The Maxtors that I have running right now are a 540MB, a 5GB, a 20GB, and a 160GB. The WDs ranged from a 1.2GB to a 40GB. I'm fairly careful not to stack drives too closely together and when possible use cases that allow for active cooling of the HDs.

Re: Made Out Of Babies

[jerdenn]

Swarm sounds pretty cool.

Of course, the chick singer chick sounds majorly pissed off. cool nonetheless.

Tell you in six months

[poptones]

Because, as I said, that's what I did when I got my own drives "upgraded" under warranty. I was going to ebay the 160g drives but since I got 250G drives I decided to keep them until the warranty runs out.

So, I got 300GB of RAID5 and 180GB of RAID0. I'll put music and video work on the RAID0 and use the RAID5 for stuff I need to keep.

But if you're going to make a TB of RAID5 from 300G drives you're going to need more than 4 of them. That means a decent case to house all those drives with a decent power supply and an extra controller card. Five 300GB drives is $750 plus you need the controller and the case - we're still up to nearly a grand.

Given the difference between $750 for the Maxtors and $850 for the same array in a Seagate flavor you'll still come out ahead by leaving the Maxtors on the shelf and going the "expensive" route - you'll have significantly less heat dumped into the case (and into the room) and you won't have to worry about how many weeks you're going to get this time before you have to shut the system down and rebuild the array with (yet another) new disk. Given the failure rate I've had in system with only one or two maxtors I would expect someone with FIVE of them in a case to be popping drives on a bimonthly basis.

Serial SCSI anyone

[Anonymous Coward]

SerialSCSI is right around the corner; and ROCKS.
SATA is to serial SCSI as IDE is to SCSI

Re:Why yes, this is a grammar-nazi post.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Well, yes, that's the point. There's nothing special about + .

It's a dense, hierarchical spec, but the juicy parts are:

An addr-spec is a specific Internet identifier that contains a locally interpreted string followed by the at-sign character ("@", ASCII value 64) followed by an Internet domain. The locally interpreted string is either a quoted-string or a dot-atom. If the string can be represented as a dot-atom (that is, it contains no characters other than atext characters or "." surrounded by atext characters), then the dot-atom form SHOULD be used and the quoted-string form SHOULD NOT be used.

So you have to look at what a dotatom or an atext is. Those are defined above:


Sorry, the Lameness Filter prevents any meaningful discussion of this idea here. Please reference section 3.2.4. of the RFC which looks like:

atext =
atom =
dot-atom =
dot-atom-text =

I wanted to point out to you the contents of the atext definition, but that's impossible here, even if I massacre it.

As you can see there are lots of punctuation characters that are valid in an e-mail address. The + just so happens to be used by convention as a space (instead of %20) by some application frameworks, and the web app authors often don't escape it properly so it gets clobbered. What's worse some lame-brained apps declare that it's an invalid e-mail address because they authors are clueless and regexp on /a-zA-Z1-9_.-/ or something they just pull out from down below. If you're working in Perl there's a CPAN module that you can just call that will properly validate e-mail addresses without any work or understanding required. Which is just fine for most apps.

Some MDA's, cyrus in particular, can automatically filter based on the + character into mailboxes for users. 'bill+slashdot' would send messages from slashdot into the slashdot mailbox if I subscribed that way. Tens of Thousands of CMU mail users were happily using + in their default mail addresses before the broken web came about.

Re:Why yes, this is a grammar-nazi post.

[fbjon]

Aha, so it's a filter into different boxes thing. I simply use views/filters in Opera's M2, not sure if Thunderbird has something similar, GMail seems to have at least.

In fact, I find that I don't care about different boxes anymore, filtering at the end point provides all the management needed. Although, using the '+'-convention would be more convenient when signing up for something new, à la spamgourment.

Re:Why yes, this is a grammar-nazi post.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Aha, so it's a filter into different boxes thing.

That happens to be one popular use of the nomenclature, but that's not particularly what it was meant for. CMU picked it up because at the time it was well supported. I happen to use plus signs to organize mail from clients machines for automated analysis, e.g.:
    root+host+domain@example.com
Gets procmailed at my box into appropriate buckets.

But I only chose that nomenclature because it has long history on the 'net, predating the web. The trouble is ninny web developers have arbitrarily chosen to declare such things invalid.

Re: Made Out Of Babies

[mihalis]

Swarm sounds pretty cool.

Of course, the chick singer chick sounds majorly pissed off. cool nonetheless.

Funny you should mention Swarm, it really works well live. I have multiple takes of it live, from various NYC venues, and also the Lime Spider in Akron. I just have to edit something together that the band actually likes and I might persuade them to post it on their website!

These drives work really well

[HogynCymraeg]

I have a number of machines with rocket raid 2220 cards coupled with 4 of these drives in each. They're sweet! And the RR comes with linux drivers and tools.