after some thinking over that thread I made last week, I think I'm gonna get an external hard drive. I just wanted to know if there are any dogs out there, and on the flip side, are there any that are just phenomenal?

 

Western Digital and Seagate are pretty much the best things going. I generally tend to avoid Maxtor, but we've got a couple of older Maxtors around here, that are working fine.

IBM Deskstars are the ones you want to avoid like the plague. IBM sold their hard drive business a year or two ago, but I forget who to.

 

yeah, I was kinda motivated to ask this as I saw on another forum someone's signature was ragging on maxtor.

 

I've had no problems with Western Digital drives. I've bought two, one 80 GB external FireWire one for my Mac and a 120 GB internal for my PC, and haven't had any problems yet. The only thing I have against HD companies is that they state that it's 80 Gigs capacity and it's actually like 76 GB. My internal is supposed to be 120 GB capacity but it's more like 114 Gigs.  

 

Thats down to manufactures counting in metric and software counting it in binary, for reasons going back to the days when storage first reached the 1024 byte mark and there was no defined standard for binary prefixes.

Unfortunatly nobody seems to be in any rush to go over to the correct termage (kibi, mebi, gigi, tebi) now that there is a defined standard.

 

Many moons ago, I worked for one of the larger PC companies... IBM drives had a rather high failure rate.

I had a Maxtor for many years,it worked, but it was slow.

Swapped it out of a couple of Western Digitals about six months back, and found them to be much faster.

so, in short, I'd suggest WD as well.

 

I'm back too, I've been away from this board a whole 8 1/2 hours. So how you guys been?  

Welcome back, btw.  

 

They sold it off to Hitachi. IBM used to be great, then they became mediocre at around the time they sold their hard disk division off to Hitachi, but they're good again. If I were building a system today I'd either go with Seagate or Samsung. Western Digital is alright, and I'd avoid Maxtor.

 

Seagate is the only hard drive I buy, they are very quite and good quality and reliable.

Western Digital has a rep of being faster drives and haven’t heard anything bad about their quality and are pretty recommended from what I have seen.

Other then those 2 I would forget about buying anything else. Some stores try and push Maxtor drives but I’ve never liked them.

 

I got talked into buying an IBM drive a few years back. After my experience with that crap, I went back to Western Digital again without any problems.

 

I'm the opposite of Soundwave..

I recomend Western Digital.. I have THREE external 160 gig hds. They work great..

I tried a seagate and it didn't want to work for me. Took it back, got my money and bought a Western Digital.

If you have a sam's club membership, or have a friend that will let you in with his, go there. I wish i had looked their earlier. They have 250gb external HDs for $130! I got my 160 for $120 at Target. I'm saving to buy a 250 GB one now..

 

I had a 200 gig WD drive about 3.5 years ago. After about a year the drive died and was VERY hot to the touch, a lot warmer than my Maxtor Drives. I got a replacement from WD and all was good for about another year when the replacement died. I also have a WD 120 gig HD that Ive had for quite a while and I haven't had any problems with it.

Ive purchased at least 6 different Maxtor harddrive and only one has failed on me ...and that was about a 1.5 years after I bought it (250 gig drive).

Sadly most HD vendors are only supplying a 1 year warranty on there drives. Seagate seems to be one of the few manufacturers to have a multi year warranty on there drives. I brother has a Seagate drive in his PC and its been running like a champ for nearly a decade.

 

I'm not sure why the Maxtor ragging is occuring. However, I'm not as interested in following the computer brands as I used to be, so that might be part of it.

Regardless, I've got a Maxtor 120GB that hasn't given me any trouble. Works fine for me.

 

That's because the partition table has to take up some space after you format it. And that can vary in size depending on how you format it. The stated capacity on the box is correct though.

 

I can vouch for the Maxtor raging. My first drive purchase was a 40GB Maxtor. It lasted about 2 years. First there were random crashes I could reboot from, but eventually the disk wouldn't spin and just made random clicking noises.

Since then I've stuck with WD and IBM. Best Buy, at least around here, has rebate sales all the time on hard drives. I got my 250GB WD drive for the low low price of $70. Booyakasha!!

 

No, its for the reason I stated earlier.

All the boot and partition information is stored in a few megs of reserved space at the start of drive and the 12.5% that NTFS tries to keep reserved for its MFTs is from the partition itself.

 

I like Maxtor Hard Drives personally. For the fact that their RMA program is amazing. I had a 160gig Hdd that was dieing, probably got bumped around to much durring shipping, so I requested for a RMA and they sent me a 200gig as a replacement. How cool is that!  
I am also told Segate is good to, but never tried them out. But I stay away from WD. I had a few and they died to quickly.

 

I own one of the new Hitachi drives and have had no problems. I actually have Western Digital, Maxtor, and Hitachi drives, and have had only one of the WD drives crap out on me. I'd say go with WD or Maxtor.

 

so for all the people who's hard drives failed on them you just lost all the data? I'm rethinking the hard drive thing again, and leaning towards optical disc backup

 

again I say do both man.. Back them up to disk and store them on a HD. I've got to get a new DVD burner. I've got about 18 disks worth of material left to back up. I do a lot of file sharing.. Got over 500GB worth of stuff.. with 250GB or so of space left now..