www.deadharddrive.com

[omega1]

Hi all, nice website, i tried this once, but it didnt work, lost the original hard drive, the new replacement identical (didnt chekc the firmware though...) and invalidated the warranty on the new one, so had to buy a second new one!!!

Anyway...

I need to buy a hefty server and was wondering if anyone has experience with the new larger hard drives, over 160Gb and which was the best make to buy??

Any ideas or suggestions??

Thanks

[Guest]

Perhaps one that clearly labels the firmware version! Seagate seem to be good.

[TekWiz]

The one with the longest warantee. Seagate now offers 5 years on all their drives. Others have reduced many of their drives to only 1 year! Western Digital has 3 years on the JB series, but only 1 year on BB. Seagates are nicely built I noticed--nicer than other ones. Seagate has been in the business as long as I can remember--they weren't considered very good back then though. I've had bad luck with Western Digital--seen a lot of bad drives, and even when they sent a replacement for an 80 gig, it failed after a week. I know a lot of their 80 gb like 2 years ago were a disaster. IBM also had a class lawsuit against them about their 75 Gxp or was it the 60 Gxp models. They lost the lawsuit--the did have a serious defect and didn't let customers know. Those things were failing like flies.

To my knowledge Seagate never had such an incident. In fact my 1 GB 1995 Seagate still works to this day. (I don't use it but it works). Maxtor has been pretty good to me--never had a problem--except some 7 gig that blew a motor chip--I think I can still spin it up and get the data off it--but been holding off on it.

But my choice for new drives would be Seagate--and the fact they give a 5 year warantee does show they have a lot of confidence--companies do not give long warantees on things they don't think will work that long. Although the reason they gave for lowering from 3 to 1 year is that they wanted to "get it in line with computer warantees". I don't believe it though. I do suspect that as drives got bigger, the failure rate started to rise compared to the smaller modern drives because everything has to be at a much higher tolerance, and the smallest problems throw the whole thing off. So maybe they saw they just couldn't afford to continue giving 3 years on their cheaper drives. But Seagate appears to have solved whatever it is that makes the others worry so much. Maybe it's not the reliablity but maybe their ability to repair/replace at a cost ratio that's efficient for them.

Either way, no matter what the reason is, or if longer warantee means it's more reliable or not, the real benefit is that as long as the drive has a warantee on it, you can always get it replaced if it fails and that means you get more for your $. Also its resale value is higher for eBay, etc.

But don't neglect to always back up all your important data (and even your not important data) and be ready for it to fail at any minute. A supposedly reliable drive is no excuse for not backing up, unless you are rolling in the money and don't care to pay several thousand $ for data retrieval...

Tek.

P.S. Here's a good article on why you should replace your HD every so often... http://thirdstar.net/beeline/compmaintainreplacedrive.htm

[Subzuki]

For a server, I would go with U320 SCSI drives from Seagate. The U160's are pretty solid in my experience.
Subzuki

[Guest]

for your type of business dont touch anything like maxtor
they are crap and break down a lot

you can go with seagate or western digital
theses are very good hard drive companys
as your running a server make sure you got a fan cooling of the hard drive as they run very hot when in operation mode

[mascal4]

I can swear by a Western Digital. 2 years and going strong