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: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.