Could you recommend me a HDD?

[GoodGame]

EDIT: MOD, sorry this belongs in Computer Talk.

My darn 10 month old Western Digital HDD just died on me (bought from a Best buy on a whim). Can anyone recommend a good replacement for this boot drive?

I was thinking about one of the WD raptor descendants, but I heard the heat off the most current ones is ridiculously high. I'm also peeved at the short life of the last one.

I've got a Barracuda, but wasn't sure if I should go with one more of those or not.

Thoughts (other than I spend too much money on my comp)?

 

[Cutlass]

Western Digital and Seagate I think are the top brands. If you are running multiple HDDs, then you want reliable rather than top performance for your boot HDD. And that probably means 7200rpm rather than 10,000rpm.

I think it's rare for a WD HDD to fail that quick. Most of my big HDDs have been WD and I haven't had a failure.

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Moderator Action: Moved to CompTalk.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Contact Western Digital and get a replacement. 10 months is still under warranty.

 

[GoodGame]

Any opinions about 'enterprise' hard-drives vs. typical ones? I decided to try a Seagate ES out to see if it's more stable as it claims.

And is there any 3rd party software for verifying how damaged a HDD is?

 

[Genocidicbunny]

most FBSD distro's should be able to tell you how many bad sectors you have on the hard drive.

As for enterprise hard drives vs. typical ones: Enterprise hard drives are mainly SCSI and SAS which for the biggest part, consumer machines do not even support. In case they do though, enterprise hard drives have a much higher uptime and are usually a lot faster and reliable than consumer level drives. At the same time, you're going to pay a lot of money for that.

 

[Jerrymander]

I have a 5 year old 40GB Maxtor harddrive that is still running fine. I've heard a bit online about Maxtor having crappy harddrives, but I've had two of them (the other for 2 years, a 200GB) and they've never failed me.

Both have been - and still are - in constant use.

 

[GoodGame]

Maxtor HDDs are now actually Seagate since they were bought out by Seagate a few years ago.

 

[Antilogic]

I've been having problems with my WD 750 GB, and was looking into purchasing another one. I am starting to notice a few "glitches" in video files that I believe are the result of bad sectors on the hard drive. I also have these curious errors where I cannot drag and drop files anymore; the hard drive "loses" them, and does not allow me to view inside the folders, doesn't allow me to delete the folders, and the data is lost. But I'm getting distracted.

In any case, I think I am watching it fail slowly, and want to buy a replacement. What is good on the market now?

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Basically, any of the well known brands ( Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, WD) will do fine. most have a good warranty ( from 1 to 5 years). You really should instead be looking at price and capacity.

You can probably find a 1TB HDD for around 120$ nowadays, especially if you dont mind if its an OEM drive.

 

[GoodGame]

I went with the Seagate enterprise (ES or ES.2 I believe). Seems to be working ok as a SATA drive, though I suspect I'm getting about 30 seconds timeouts for some reason as the system stalls infrequently around once an hour.

I have to figure that one out---thinking its a BIOS issue, or maybe the system is confused about which of my drives is the master; I have one IDE drive on cableselect in the slave position of the cables, and the other in the SATA primary slot.

 

[Macha]

I've been having problems with my WD 750 GB, and was looking into purchasing another one. I am starting to notice a few "glitches" in video files that I believe are the result of bad sectors on the hard drive. I also have these curious errors where I cannot drag and drop files anymore; the hard drive "loses" them, and does not allow me to view inside the folders, doesn't allow me to delete the folders, and the data is lost. But I'm getting distracted.

In any case, I think I am watching it fail slowly, and want to buy a replacement. What is good on the market now?

I've been having problems with my WD 500GB too. At first, it wouldn't let me move/delete anything. I called up help & support and there "solution" fixed that but now instead, it disconnects from the network every six hours.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

I went with the Seagate enterprise (ES or ES.2 I believe). Seems to be working ok as a SATA drive, though I suspect I'm getting about 30 seconds timeouts for some reason as the system stalls infrequently around once an hour.

I have to figure that one out---thinking its a BIOS issue, or maybe the system is confused about which of my drives is the master; I have one IDE drive on cableselect in the slave position of the cables, and the other in the SATA primary slot.

Seagate had a problem recently with its 1.5TB drives that is the exact same problem as you describe ( random stalls and timeouts for as much as a minute). Maybe you should check out what other people are doing to solve that problem and it may help you. Of course, if you dont have a 1.5TB drive, its unlikely that thats the actual problem behind it.