17 Serial ATA Hard Drives Compared

TheRaindog writes "The Tech Report has an in-depth look at Maxtor's DiamondMax 11 hard drive that provides some interesting insight on how Seagate's recent acquisition can improve deficiencies in its own drives. More valuable, however, is the fact that the review offers a detailed comparison of 17 different Serial ATA drives from Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital. Performance is compared across a wide range of typical desktop, multitasking, and multi-user loads, and noise levels and power consumption tests also provide interesting results. Definitely worth a look for anyone in the market for a new hard drive."

Comments

Can't use those reviews as a real indicator

[FerretFrottage]

Most people generally post when things go wrong or bad; very few seem to post when there is nothing wrong. You get a DOA drive, you're gonna bitch about it because it can't use it. I fit right there as well. I got a WD RE2 drive from newegg for my tivo S3 and it is working like a champ. It's quiet, fast and gives me 60+ hr of HD recording time. But did I post a positive review at newegg?...nope, I didn't. I was too busy using my new toy.

Re:Can't use those reviews as a real indicator

[FerretFrottage]

I'd agree with in an fair and ideal world/system, but could users/companies (either the manufacturer or the end seller) be submitting more favorable reviews for products they want to push? I'm not saying newegg (or its users) does that, but it has been done before.

In the case of the RE2 and newegg, I used the reviews as a guide, but when I searched the "broader" internet for people having problems with that drive, the "big" problem was just not to be found. As with anything and especially the internet, buyer beware. Heck for all I know, the next WD drive I get could be a junker.

Re:Can't use those reviews as a real indicator

[steve-san]

If that's the case, then why are 15 out of the 27 reviews for the RE2 posted as "Excellent"?

In fact, Newegg is absolutely littered with thousands upon thousands of reviews from people who return to rave about their new toys... a bit to the extreme, actually.
Go see how many HUNDREDS have come back to the site to post about their shiny new floppy drives, for crap's sake.

Back to the point -- 15/27 is still bad (esp. after reading the comments about failure) compared to the competition.

Re:Missing statistic...

[Colin Smith]

If it was a big issue, you'd be using SCSI.

Re:I'd rather see a reliability comparison

[ncc74656]

though I did inadvertently discover that those little plastic ribs on the SATA connectors aren't quite as strong as you might expect . . . *snap*

Mechanically speaking, the SATA connector doesn't seem particularly robust. I've had problems at work with one system in which the drive would occasionally disconnect and reconnect. Since the connectors use flat contacts that slide past each other and don't have much (if any) spring force behind them, it seems to me that you don't get as solid a connection as you did with PATA.

Under Windows, having the boot drive randomly disconnect usually results in a BSOD. It's just great when you're trying to get work done. :-|

Re:Not too happy with SATA in general

[drsmithy]

As for the superdrives, they too in my experience seem to go wrong within 12-18months, generally on the burning side. As you say thank God they're cheap now and they're easy to get at.

I believe this has to do with the much weightier (relative to single-purpose devices) laser head arrangement that has the different types of lasers for each standard.

It also has to do with what you use the drive for. Eg: a drive that only ever reads or writes whole discs will last a lot longer than one constantly being used for random accesses.