PC Peripherals high capacity drives - any recommendations?

P

PCJedi

Adept
Another input needed. Maybe Easy can help.
There has been much talk about high capacity drives 250 GB and above. I have been experinmenting with various drives and reading on Easy's post. I have managed to get DiamondMax 10 . the problem is that out of the 3 drives i purchased- all have failed on me. And replacement have taken one week :mad: . While the standard 160GB Seagate or Samsung SATA drives have worked well.
Its not the heat, nor a system failure. The head actually is crashing on the media. I need a high capacity drive to build a 1TB Raid. so i am badly stuck. Can any of you guys help.
Is the Seagate 400 GB reliable?
I am not so sure on Maxtor, since most of them have crashed. My data is too critical.
PS: Only SATA please. IDE is passe
 
Oh MAN.... this sux.... I have read that the Maxtor DM10 and Maxline III are amongst the best drives in the market today. But what the Storage gurus have concluded is that the drives you buy are only as good as the handling of the drives in the pipeline. It was found by people in the forum that there were many dead drives of the same batch sourced from one importer and not from others that led to the conclussion that the drive handling plays an important factor in its working life.

I had 2 Maxtor 120GB SATA drives die on me in the last year. Now I am on my third Maxtor 120GB SATA drive. So this may mean that the Maxtor importer in India does not handle the drives very carefully.

Attached is a "WORST" drives chart poll.... the Maxtors included in this poll are the older Maxtor DM9's which is what I have 2 of - the 120GB and 160GB .... I think the Hitachi drives are good. Very few people have any complaints about them in the Storage forum. But then they talk very highly about the Maxtor DM10 and Maxline III drives. By the way the Maxline III is an enterprise class drive.

IMHO The BEST drive to buy is the Hitachi T7K250 series - these are meant to be very GOOD. NOT the 7K250 which are the older series. The T7K250 drives are SATA-II drives.

WorstDrives.jpg


Eazy posted 18.17 minutes later:

About the Drive temperatures..... have you kept a check on the temps ? I have the HDD temps always showing in the Sys Tray via Mother Board Monitor.

I have a P160 case which has 2 x 120mm fans which sandwich the HDD's so the drives are as cool as I can possibly keep them - I found that there is a difference of about 5C if the drive was placed in the topmost slot (coolest) or the bottom one (warmest). Everyone says that the bottom slot was the coolest but in my case it is the warmest :huh:

The temps I get for the Maxtor 120GB which is the D drive in the topmost slot (warmest slot) is 38C idle and on heavy load it touches just over 50C !! :O I know that 50C is not good - so what type of temps wuld this drive reach in a normal case which has possibly one 80mm fan blowing over it ? It would definitley die.
 
thanks that was an interesting reply. But me thinks have found the solution to the Maxtor problem. Will post if once i verify it.
 
Hi Eazy,

Thanks for the help.
I finally found out whats wrong with the Maxtor - both diamond Max 10 and Maxline. seems like both seem to have a problem with some specific machines.

Well i found that the problem was with the Staggered spin up detection as implemented by Maxtor.

Instead of doing a cut paste. giving you the link

staggered pin up problem

Well i have something to add to this.

I did implement the solution. and my findings are:

1. If you have 2 or 3 drives of the this series connected, then there is no problem. Even without the patch

2. Even IF you implement this on a single drive setup, it does not work on an overclocked machine. The data gets corrupted and the drive head crashes. I have 3 drives to prove it. Has to do with the way the drive spins up.

3. I suggest if you are never going to overclock the machine the Maxline III is awesome, and so is the Diamond MAX and i have great performance in RAID 0.

I hope this helps you Easy.

Sorry to have posted my findings late...but was busy with my new rig. :hap2: Be scared..very scared.. :muahaha: :muahaha:
 
PCJedi said:
Hi Eazy,

Thanks for the help.
I finally found out whats wrong with the Maxtor - both diamond Max 10 and Maxline. seems like both seem to have a problem with some specific machines.

Well i found that the problem was with the Staggered spin up detection as implemented by Maxtor.

I did implement the solution. and my findings are:

1. If you have 2 or 3 drives of the this series connected, then there is no problem. Even without the patch

2. Even IF you implement this on a single drive setup, it does not work on an overclocked machine. The data gets corrupted and the drive head crashes. I have 3 drives to prove it. Has to do with the way the drive spins up.

3. I suggest if you are never going to overclock the machine the Maxline III is awesome, and so is the Diamond MAX and i have great performance in RAID 0.
Click to expand...

:O :O :O

I have never had a problem with any Maxtor Drive not getting picked up on boot.....unless they were dead - this happened to 2 drives .....working fine ....reboot.... BANG !! - instant paper weight - and a minor heart attack :p

This is the FIRST time I have heard about this problem ... maybe it is a nVidia chipset on AMD boards problem.... I spend a lot of time at the Storage Review forum and I have not seen any post there too about this problem. (possible they are there and I have just not seen them) Most of the people I see on the other forums use Intel based boards and it may be a problem only with AMD boards. I will search for this and see if it is a known or common problem.

I have 5 HDD's

250GB Maxline Plus II 250GB
160GB DM9 SATA
120GB DM9 SATA
80GB Hitachi PATA - USB external
20GB Seagate 2.5" - USB external
I connect any number of these drives in any combinations I feel like - I connect drives for a day or for weeks depending on my mood. Each drive is a mirror of the others - I make Images of my current setup to the Hitachi drive and restore the image to whichever drive is my main XP drive for the moment - sort of flavour for the week. At times I use the Hitachi 80GB as my only drive which is removed from the USB case and inserted into the desktop case. What I am trying to say is that all my drives are used alone or in combination with other drives to run my system ... AND... I have never had the problem you mention. Not even with only one SATA drive running ... or both... or when I had 2 Maxtor 120GB SATA and I ran these as RAID 0.

Nowdays I dont overclock my P4 2.4C as I dont play games or run benchies.
 
The Maxline III and DM10 both work fine on an intel 915 board. (not OC'd) and you don't have these specific models which i am talking about. its only with these models and infact with a specific batch number "b9" to be specific. :-(
All the ones at the moment in Mumbai are B9 - waiting for my replacements from BLR.
 
You can also have a look at the Seagate 400GB SATA Drive.I found it to be very good.

My personal experience with Seagate drives has been very good,replacement is fast, not much drives have failed on me...

I havent used Maxtor 80SATA,didnt like the drive...
 
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