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#1 2006-01-10 06:49:01

ganja_guru
Member
Registered: 2005-02-14
Posts: 464

HDD buying suggestion

I have a Seagate 200GB SATA (with NCQ) collecting dust here. I want to use it as an external drive (using USB2.0 and a SATA drive enclosure). I have two options

1) Go ahead with the original plan. This would set me back $64, cause SATA enclosures are still a bit pricey

2) Trade in the Seagate 200GB for a Maxtor 250GB IDE and an original Maxtor USB 2.0 Drive enclosure, and pay the difference ($66)

So, the price is pretty much the same, but what should I do? Will the NCQ in the Seagate make a difference in USB 2.0? Shouldn't I stick with SATA cause its more future proof? Or should I get the 250GB IDE Maxtor?

Thanks everyone.

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#2 2006-01-10 09:17:38

Cam
Member
From: Brisbane, Aus
Registered: 2004-12-21
Posts: 658
Website

Re: HDD buying suggestion

I've never had a Seagate but a mate has returned 3 Seagate SATA drives that have died on him and the time it took them to get him new ones was crap. Haven't heard bad things from other people and it could be because he's running about 8 hardrives at once but yeah, from what I've seen I wouldn't recommend Seagate.

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#3 2006-01-10 09:59:00

Jefg60
Member
From: UK
Registered: 2006-01-07
Posts: 100

Re: HDD buying suggestion

no problems with seagate here. if your friend has 8 drives, is his PSU up to the job of powering them all?

To answer the OP, if the money works out about the same I'd stick with SATA and seagate, IMHO they are better drives than maxtors, and thats before you factor in the sata / ide difference.

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#4 2006-01-10 11:17:15

Cam
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From: Brisbane, Aus
Registered: 2004-12-21
Posts: 658
Website

Re: HDD buying suggestion

if your friend has 8 drives, is his PSU up to the job of powering them all?

Yeah, he's got 2 PSUs in a big mother of a case.

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#5 2006-01-10 12:02:05

T-Dawg
Forum Fellow
From: Charlotte, NC
Registered: 2005-01-29
Posts: 2,736

Re: HDD buying suggestion

From my own experience, maxtor is crap. I've had three of them die on me. Just bought a WD which is awsome. I've heard seagate is as good as WD but more favorable in the larger capacities. I would hang on to the seagate.

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#6 2006-01-10 13:51:30

ganja_guru
Member
Registered: 2005-02-14
Posts: 464

Re: HDD buying suggestion

I have 4x250GB WD's on raid0 with absolutely no issues. This seagate which I have now is actually a replacement for one I bought earlier which fscked up in a few months. But all this is luck really, since all my older drives were seagate which never had any issues. Maybe I should just trade in for a WD. But the question remains..will I see that much of a difference in USB 2.0 between IDE and SATA?

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#7 2006-01-10 18:34:09

stavrosg
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From: Rhodes, Greece
Registered: 2005-05-01
Posts: 330
Website

Re: HDD buying suggestion

USB2.0 is slow enough as not to see any difference from the SATA disk over the IDE one. I'd go for the extra capacity myself smile

On the maker holy war - I've seen many WD disks fail on me, while the Maxtor managed to stay usable a little longer. So I don't think that the maker really matters. (I tend to avoid WD nowadays, though)

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#8 2006-01-10 20:54:04

paranoos
Member
From: thornhill.on.ca
Registered: 2004-07-22
Posts: 442

Re: HDD buying suggestion

doesn't the maxtor have 16mb cache?

i read a review some time ago, when i first heard of NCQ ... they compared a seagate ncq drive vs a maxtor 16mb cache drive... the cache makes a MUCH bigger difference.

ncq is an elegant technology, however.

just keep what you have, since switching would be a bit of a hassle.
and go buy lots of bubblegum with the $2 you have extra.

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#9 2006-01-10 22:30:20

Gullible Jones
Member
Registered: 2004-12-29
Posts: 4,863

Re: HDD buying suggestion

Like Penguin, I've seen a lot of crap from Maxtor drives. In my experience, they tend to be excessively noisy and prone to early death. On the other hand, those are relatively old Maxtor HDDs I'm talking about.

(Got a WD and a Samsung right now, and they're still holding out, knock on wood...)

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#10 2006-01-10 23:25:42

kozaki
Member
From: London >. < Paris
Registered: 2005-06-13
Posts: 671
Website

Re: HDD buying suggestion

Bought a nice SATA (alu self alimented with fan & On/Off button) external box for 34EUR 2 months ago, that was in Paris


Seeded last month: Arch 50 gig, derivatives 1 gig
Desktop @3.3GHz 8 gig RAM, linux-ck
laptop #1 Atom 2 gig RAM, Arch linux stock i686 (6H w/ 6yrs old battery smile) #2: ARM Tegra K1, 4 gig RAM, ChrOS
Atom Z520 2 gig RAM, OMV (Debian 7) kernel 3.16 bpo on SDHC | PGP Key: 0xFF0157D9

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#11 2006-01-11 04:45:29

aCoder
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From: Medina, OH
Registered: 2004-03-07
Posts: 359
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Re: HDD buying suggestion

I think you'll probably have more 'available' storage with the SATA disk.  Mainly because of those nifty new features, and how much better, in general, SATA works than IDE, in my experience.

Now, (correct me please!), but I would think that USB 2 would provide plenty of bandwidth, and that the HDD interface would be the bottleneck, unless it's SATA2.

USB 2: 480Mbps
SATA: 150Mbps
ATA133: 133Mbps
SATA2: 3Gbps


If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.
  - John Cage

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#12 2006-01-11 06:44:04

deficite
Member
From: Augusta, GA
Registered: 2005-06-02
Posts: 693

Re: HDD buying suggestion

I've found Maxtor to be reliable and we have quite a few of their drives in our household. My brother's computer got hit by lightning and still uses his Maxtor HDD today, so I guess I'm pro-Maxtor.

Hitachi still rules and is my favorite drive.

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#13 2006-01-11 10:59:15

Jefg60
Member
From: UK
Registered: 2006-01-07
Posts: 100

Re: HDD buying suggestion

aCoder wrote:

I think you'll probably have more 'available' storage with the SATA disk.  Mainly because of those nifty new features, and how much better, in general, SATA works than IDE, in my experience.

Now, (correct me please!), but I would think that USB 2 would provide plenty of bandwidth, and that the HDD interface would be the bottleneck, unless it's SATA2.

USB 2: 480Mbps
SATA: 150Mbps
ATA133: 133Mbps
SATA2: 3Gbps

I was thinking that, but I didnt want to say it, because theres a doubt in my mind about overheads and such. I mean does anyone really get 480mb/s from usb2?

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#14 2006-01-11 11:53:05

rpgcyco
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2005-09-27
Posts: 74

Re: HDD buying suggestion

I lost almost all my files when my Maxtor 40GB died in just over one year after I purchased it. I've made a promise to myself never buy one again, no matter how enticing it may be.

I've had a WD 20GB in my old computer from 2001 and it's been fine. The Seagate 40GB I got with my next PC after that one, is still working, though it causes the PC to stall and beep at startup because it is incredibly slow to spin up. After that it seems fine though, but naturally I never did trust any important data to it.... maybe I should have? big_smile

I've had a 40GB WD in my Xbox since December '04 and it works fine, but a little bit noisey. I just recently replaced that though with the 80GB Seagate I took out my PC to make way for my brand new 250GB Seagate SATA (which I got for the price of a 200GB SATA, because the guy in the shop obviously can't read labels), both of which work fine!

I also have a 120GB WD SATA which has all my important files on it. The original HDD in my Xbox was a 10GB WD (some were Seagates) and it worked fine for the year I used it. So, it seems WD is the only drive manufacturer that I haven't had some problem with.

Oh, and I also have a 346MB Seagate drive that works. big_smile

- Rpg Cyco

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#15 2006-01-11 13:21:34

stavrosg
Member
From: Rhodes, Greece
Registered: 2005-05-01
Posts: 330
Website

Re: HDD buying suggestion

Jefg60 wrote:
aCoder wrote:

I think you'll probably have more 'available' storage with the SATA disk.  Mainly because of those nifty new features, and how much better, in general, SATA works than IDE, in my experience.

Now, (correct me please!), but I would think that USB 2 would provide plenty of bandwidth, and that the HDD interface would be the bottleneck, unless it's SATA2.

USB 2: 480Mbps
SATA: 150Mbps
ATA133: 133Mbps
SATA2: 3Gbps

I was thinking that, but I didnt want to say it, because theres a doubt in my mind about overheads and such. I mean does anyone really get 480mb/s from usb2?

USB2.0 bandwith is a really bad joke.
If you really want a fast external hard disk, then you should go for a IEEE1394a (Firewire) connection. The nominal speed is a bit lower (400Mb/sec) but it is much closer to the sustained.
This is based on my experience with my USB2/IEEE1394 enclosure and as always, YMMV.

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#16 2006-01-11 15:38:05

ganja_guru
Member
Registered: 2005-02-14
Posts: 464

Re: HDD buying suggestion

Yeah I was thinking of buying a IEEE1394 enclosure, but the problem with those is a lot of older machines (such as my friends) don't have a firewire port. USB is much more universal. Going by all these posts, I'll probably stick with the seagate SATA and get the SATA to USB2.0 enclosure. But a trade in for a 250GB IDE WD sounds sooooooo tempting....

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#17 2006-01-12 18:37:16

stavrosg
Member
From: Rhodes, Greece
Registered: 2005-05-01
Posts: 330
Website

Re: HDD buying suggestion

Well, my enclosure has both IEEE1394 and USB2.0 ports (you can use one at a time though wink tongue ), so I use 1394 where available and usb for the rest smile

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#18 2006-01-21 16:25:06

ganja_guru
Member
Registered: 2005-02-14
Posts: 464

Re: HDD buying suggestion

An update.. The Seagate replacement SATA drive I had has bad sectors too. Good job Seagate! Anyway, My computer guy(who I did not buy the bad drive from originally) was nice enough to offer to buy the drive from me and replace it with a IDE 200GB and a USB2.0 enclosure ..Preiliminary hdparm tests give me around 29MB/s, will have to run bonnie later. Unfortunately, this new IDE drive..is a seagate. The alternative available right now is samsung. No thanks. I havent had problems with seagate's IDE drive, so I'm hoping this is ok. Doing an overnight badblocks on this one now.

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#19 2006-01-21 17:06:49

Gullible Jones
Member
Registered: 2004-12-29
Posts: 4,863

Re: HDD buying suggestion

Samsung? I've got a Samsung drive... No bad sectors, hasn't failed me yet. Granted, it's a standard 5000 RPM deal with a 2 MB cache, but still...

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#20 2006-01-21 18:28:32

ganja_guru
Member
Registered: 2005-02-14
Posts: 464

Re: HDD buying suggestion

Well I've always had this thing against samsung..not specifically their drives, but consumer electronics in general..Their displays especially...really subpar picture quality...and a couple of other products like cell phones are just barely ok....

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#21 2006-01-21 20:43:22

elasticdog
Member
From: Washington, USA
Registered: 2005-05-02
Posts: 995
Website

Re: HDD buying suggestion

ganja_guru wrote:

Their displays especially...really subpar picture quality...

I'd disagree on that one...correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Samsung provide the actual LCD panels for both Apple and Dell for a long time on many of their models?

I've got a Samsung HD too on my Arch machine, and haven't had any problems as of yet.  I mostly bought it due to the drive's reputation for quietness though, not performance.

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#22 2006-01-21 20:59:07

iphitus
Forum Fellow
From: Melbourne, Australia
Registered: 2004-10-09
Posts: 4,927

Re: HDD buying suggestion

Samsung drives are awesome, and yes, they have a reputation for being quiet.

But otherwise.. I'm surprised you have had so many bad seagates, I'd be happy to blame it on poor handling somewhere on the line tongue

I have 2 seagates here and they work fine smile

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