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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."
These things are loud, especially under load. As quiet as rainfall and as loud as normal conversation?
I'm in the market for one of these -- SATA 500, to match an existing RAID array. Unfortunately, these benchmark numbers just don't tell the whole story. While WD's 500GB RE2 has some of the best stats on the charts, the reliability reviews (at least on Newegg) are dismal. Sadly, this matches with my own experiences with WD.
I'll gladly sacrifice a few percentage points of performance if it means increased reliability, especially when we're talking HD's. I already don't trust the things farther than I can throw 'em (thus the RAID-5).
What you want is irrelevant; what you've chosen is at hand! - Spock, ST VI
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.
It would have been interesting had they done a comparison with one of the Asus Z62F solid state machines that uses flash ram as a hard drive.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
No they're not really. As a recording engineer and programmer HD noise is a concern of mine. My system has 4x Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 and they really are quiet. I've used Barracudas for about 5 years now and this choice was based on HD noise figures from that time. 5 years ago the Barracudas were the quietist thing on the market and beat the competition hands down. Seems like now all the brands are pretty good - actually I'm pleasantly suprised how much improvement there's been judging by the figures. An increase of 3dB is not very much under load and nothing to get upset about. Some of my older drives would probably come in at 60-65dBA which was too loud. My PSU fan has to be the main culprit in any acoustic noise generated nowadays. As for the linked noise centre guides, these are the standard examples given everytime I've seen and there's no way the Barracuda 7200.9 is the same level as a normal conversation. To get this figure they probably average in all the normal silence of speech too I would guess. The band 50-60dBA is actually quite large in terms of SPL - every 6dB gain represents a doubling in power, every 12dB a quadrupling, so it's quite a big range.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
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.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Ok, I'll Bite.
:p
Over 400 g5's deployed at my site over the last 2 years, all with SATA drives. There has been only one drive failure so far,
and it was premature so it was probably a bad unit or the movers roughed up his computer when he changed
offices, because it coincided with that event. We had a bunch of the last edition of the grey g4's with maxtor
hard drives that all seemed to fail within a few months of each other a 3 years back. We also
had a run of bad Maxtors in a batch of small form factor Dell desktops. We lost about 10 in one month.
Hooray for 3 year service plans !
the "Super"drives are dropping like flies though...I keep a stock of replacements in the closet. Good thing
a replacement with dual layer and lightscribe is around 60 bucks these days.
This is all highly subjective and anecdotal and not meant to slander maxtor in any way
music lover since 1969
Where are the 10K RPM SATA hard drives?
As of a year ago, Western Digital was the only one in the market. We need more competition for this so we can get cheap fast hard drives. SCSI is too expensive.