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Geek Culture / Reliability of bigger hard disks

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Arkheii
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Joined: 15th Jun 2003
Location: QC, Philippines
Posted: 4th Jan 2006 09:09
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I've been meaning to get a larger hard disk for my expanding collection of crap, so I've been keeping an eye on the prices of 200GB SATA drives (the biggest one available here). But my classmate said something about big hard drives being less reliable, something to do with having a greater tendency to corrupt files and stuff.

The only brands available (with 200GB capacity) here are Maxtor and Seagate. Any suggestions/experiences?

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Pincho Paxton
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Posted: 4th Jan 2006 09:14
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My 160GB SATA was hard to format, but in the end it worked great. To format a Maxtor SATA you have to get MAXBLAST 4 off the Maxtor site. I had no documentation with my hard drive to tell me about that.

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Me!
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Posted: 4th Jan 2006 09:32 Edited at: 4th Jan 2006 09:34
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larger drives give out more heat, typicaly the makers ignore this problem, case makers ignore the problem too, if I have my two 160gig drives in the two adjacent hard drive bays in this case then they overheat in about 5 minutes and I get drive error messages or the system locks up or just crashes, now I have one in the lowest HD bay and one in the floppy drive bay witha extra fan blowing air past them, no problems at all, I think thats probably the reason hard drive coolers have appeared on the market, and the reason the makers don`t fit em?, well, it`s too big to fit in one standard drive bay with a cooler fitted, plus the cooler adds to the production cost and would make the drive none standard, hurting sales, so they don`t fit one and blame the user for not having enough cooling.

(moral...I find em perfectly reliable as long as you keep em COOL, but thats true of all electrical equipment)



Windows: 32 bit extension/graphical shell for a 16bit patch to an 8bit OS originally coded for a 4bit CPU, written by a 2bit company that can't stand 1bit of competition, now available in 64bits.
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Joh
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Location: Malaysia
Posted: 4th Jan 2006 09:46
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I personally have not used them, but I often do work at friends video post-production studio. 200gb Maxtor so far no problems such as data loss. Doing realtime DV editing often thrashes these babies around, thus constant monitoring of fragmentaion and defraggin when appropriate is required. We also use alot of external hds' but this where it can get a bit dodgy. Normally from over heating and/or quirky power, which has resulted in boot sector corruption.
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IanG
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Joined: 25th Sep 2004
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Posted: 4th Jan 2006 10:19
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i've got a 200gb and a 120gb (both maxtor pata drives) in this one, and they haven't failed yet, the 200 has been in for over a year now

my dad has a 250gb maxtor sata drive, but it's only been in a month so reliability is not really on the cards yet, and they are a pain to format, you have to use maxblast to format it, then during the windows setup you have to hit f6 iirc to add aditional drivers so the sata is recognised - these drivers should be on your motherboard disk, but makes sure you have the drivers on a floppy as thats what the windows setup likes

as to performance and the like, i use both my drives for video editing, amoung many other things, so they have had a lot of pounding, and they still tick nicely


amd athlon xp 2600+,1280mb,FX 5200 128mb,200gb,xp pro sp2
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SirFire
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Posted: 4th Jan 2006 13:30 Edited at: 4th Jan 2006 13:30
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I have a 160gb seagate drive, and it has given me nothing but problems. Data corruption, odd noises sometimes come from it that sound not unlike breaking up the balls on a pool table. I've had to run data recovery on it 3 times since I bought it a year ago.

But imho seagate is a good brand, but I was unfortunate enough to have drawn a lemon in the lottery.

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Arkheii
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Location: QC, Philippines
Posted: 5th Jan 2006 13:48
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@SirFire: What a letdown...

I have a pair of Seagates (40GB and 80GB) on this machine. How they manage to work despite the heat is a mystery to me.

So apart from formatting hassles, Maxtor has a pretty good rep. Anything else from the Seagate crowd?

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JoelJ
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Location: UTAH
Posted: 5th Jan 2006 17:41
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yeah, seagate just bought out Maxtor... those little jerks...

Appointed by Jimmy as "MR. GAME REVIEW WIZARD GUY"
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Darkbasic MADPSP
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Location: Uk
Posted: 5th Jan 2006 17:46
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my 80 gig hd rules no crashes no lock ups and very fast easy to format

Experienced DB http://www.greatgames3d.com (work in progress site)
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Ian T
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Posted: 6th Jan 2006 02:22
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Quote: "I have a 160gb seagate drive, and it has given me nothing but problems. Data corruption, odd noises sometimes come from it that sound not unlike breaking up the balls on a pool table. I've had to run data recovery on it 3 times since I bought it a year ago.
"


Bad individual drive maybe? I got a drive from Seagate that crashed in its first few months and had some other odd problems before it died, but they replaced it without any fuss and bother and the replacement drive hasn't given me any problems.


Arr
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Me!
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Posted: 6th Jan 2006 12:55 Edited at: 6th Jan 2006 12:56
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Keep em cool, general consensus in the techy forums is the cooler you keep the drive the better it will perform and the less problems you get, be honest, do you realy expect a device crammed full of electronics and high performance magnetic media to work flawelessly while its red hot and smoking (ok...so I exagerate..but you get the idea), just put your finger on it while its running, if its more than quite warm then stick a cooler on it, hardrives are designed so that they will try to continue to run, even with errors caused by overheating the built in error correction will try to keep the device running, but eventualy they will get serious errors they can`t recover from, fail or burn out.



Windows: 32 bit extension/graphical shell for a 16bit patch to an 8bit OS originally coded for a 4bit CPU, written by a 2bit company that can't stand 1bit of competition, now available in 64bits.
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