Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 09:47:07 -0400 From: "Andrew C. Hornback" <achornback@worldnet.att.net> To: <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: reliable HDD brand (LONG) Message-ID: <019f01c14824$106101e0$0e00000a@tomcat> In-Reply-To: <F125IHYtLvW0YJV12Dp000096f4@hotmail.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> -----Original Message----- > From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG > [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Charles Burns > Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2001 11:55 PM > To: questions@freebsd.org > Subject: Re: reliable HDD brand (LONG) > > Maxtor, well, frankly Maxtor used to be horrible. They were among > the worst > brands of drives. They have a made a full circle, much like > Western Digital > (more on that below) and now make very reliable IDE drives. THey > have a new > model using only 1 of the 2 sides of the platter that is supposed to have > less than half of the moving parts of their other drives, and is > supposed to > be extra, extra reliable (and also small--max of 20GB) > Maxtors used to be better than IBMs overall because they were so much > cheaper, but IBM seems to have lowered their prices to about the > same level > (at least on the websites that I shop from) From my experience, Quantum was the absolute worst. Anyone remember the Bigfoot fiasco? I had two of these drives out of a shipment of 12 do the exact same thing... got 'em physically installed, fdisked the drive, formatted it, and as soon as the OS (a MS OS at that) went to reboot during install, the entire drive hosed itself. Gotta remember this too, Quantum sold their HDD unit to Maxtor. Makes one wonder... > Western Digital used to be great--probably the best brand of IDE > drive, now > probably one of the worst. I have returned more WD drives per > capita since > the age of 4GB (or so) models than any other brand. They decided > to change > their business model to making pure cheap drives. They have just recently > reversed that (very recently) and are now getting back into quality, > performance drives. Their most recent 100GB drive is actually THE fastest > IDE drive, beating even the 60GXP and the Maxtor Diamondmax + > 7200RPM drives > (though probably not the new 80GB model that will be released in October) WD has done some strange things in the past few years. First I'd heard that they were closing out their consumer grade hard drive production facility, so they could focus on OEM contracts for the big PC producers. Then it came out that they were going to get rid of their enterprise unit (the one that does the OEM contracts) and focus on commodity drives. *shakes his head* About all I can say is this, I've got a 10 Gig WD Ultra66 IDE in my Windows (toy)box, and it's never given me a problem for more than 2 years. > Seagate -- makes great SCSI drives (and FAST!), but in my > experience, which > does not include any of their newest (>12 GB) drives, Seagates aren't as > good as IBM or Maxtor. Hmm, I'm not sure that I agree here. The 18+ Gig Seagates that run 15krpm are good drives. Back when I was an IT consultant, we had a client that REQUIRED Seagate drives, and had the "Price is not an issue" thing along with it. So, I spec'd out a RAID array of those things... they've never had problem with them, and never had a drive fail. > In general, if you want reliability, go SCSI, mirroring IDE or, RAID5 IDE > and have a hot spare. If you want enterprise reliability (which > you probably > don't if you were considering IDE drives) get a solid state > drive. They are > usually above USD$25,000. Ouch. (These things are also blazing > fast as far > as access time--great for that "special" 5% of files on a big file server) Solid state drives are pretty nice... but, like you said, spendy as all get out. SCSI - the best non-exotic hardware storage solution around. --- Andy To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?019f01c14824$106101e0$0e00000a>