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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."
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!
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".
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
WD now has 3 year minimum warranty and 5 year for enterprise drives:
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http://www.wdc.com/en/company/releases/PressRelea
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.
". . . 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
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.
Mandriva 2005LE boots fine from my SATA drive using the 2.6x kernel, so does DesktopBSD.