SATA II Hard Drives

[.geek]

I'm looking for a SATA II HDD +- 300GB. What would you recommend and why: Seagate or Western Digital?

 

[RSx]

Seagate PERIOD Unless you go for a WD Raptor.

I have had many friends who had WD's crash over the years but not a single seagate has gone wrong.

One of my 160GB Seagate's did give a problem well not really. Micrososft Windows could not deal with a drive bigger than 128GB and once I went over that I lost all my data. MS did patch it and all was well.

Seagate has not given me a single problem in over 10 years and I wont get anywhere near WD unless its a Raptor drive.

The Raptors are awesome tho.

EDIT - BTW I am also a wargeek but I are undercover and stuff

 

[Jah]

Agree, last 4 HDD's i bought have been Seagate, never had a problem. That problem with Windows not recognising a HDD bigger than 128GB goes away once you install winxp sp2.

 

[RSx]

Agree, last 4 HDD's i bought have been Seagate, never had a problem. That problem with Windows not recognising a HDD bigger than 128GB goes away once you install winxp sp2.

Yep but sadly I had the problem before SP2 was around Had to install teh LBA Patch in order not to lose data again.

I am still running a 1.3GB Seagate Drive in one of the old PC's here at home

 

[bdt]

Bearing in mind that WD are the only manuf. to do 10k rpm drives in the SATA space, it speaks volumes as to their capabilities. But OTOH, for the 'regular' (i.e. 7200 rpm) drives, they offer only 3 year warranty against Seagate's 5 year..

For my part I think a more relevant way of looking at it is the specs: things like drive cache, NCQ, and the like rather than a the warranty pissing contest. I mean, 3 years down the line is an age in consumer drives!

 

[RSx]

3 year warranty doesnt give you your data back when your WD dies

One of my friends use to have a computer business and he reached a point where he would no longer sell WD's cos they gave so much problems.

Me I just watched as friends lost data and converted them to Seagate.

 

[.geek]

Thanks for the replies so far..

 

[squirrel]

Seagate are superior to WD imo. By the way, Seagate bought out Maxtor a few weeks ago, but in the current state I would not touch one - the only thing that I like about them is the cheaper price

 

[Silent_Bob]

Seagate FTW!

 

[RSx]

I say go for the Seagate 300GB SATA II Drive NCQ and 16mb buffer. Only seen the 16MB buffer version at a few places but I know it does exist.

 

[Brawler]

Also been using seegate for many years, no probs.
I also have a SATA 160GB showing up as 128GB, is there any way to fix this without formating? I have SP2

 

[AntiThesis]

Seagate forever

My server runs all Seagate hdds (2x250GB SATA II)
My main PC runs all Seagate.

Never had a problem. In fact one of the drives in my main pc is still a 20GB seagate drive that I've had for years.

5 year warranty sells me as well.

 

[.geek]

I have 2 x Seagate Barracuda 200GB [SATA] drives, 1 x 80GB [ATA] and 1x60GB [ATA] (both Seagate) and then 1 x 60GB WD [ATA].

Just thought I'd find out what else is on offer!

AntiThesis, do you notice any peformance increases with the SATA II drives?

 

[DigitalSoldier]

I say go for the Seagate 300GB SATA II Drive NCQ and 16mb buffer. Only seen the 16MB buffer version at a few places but I know it does exist.

It does exist

Go for seagate I still got my 80gb ide seagate drive as a second drive and I got it when they first got into the market and its still going strong . And seagate is a lot cheaper than wd not talking about wd raptor

 

[RSx]

Also been using seegate for many years, no probs.
I also have a SATA 160GB showing up as 128GB, is there any way to fix this without formating? I have SP2

Yep once SP2 is installed the best way would be to get Partition Magic and just resize it to the full 160GB. I did this a while ago when I wanted to extend a partition to the full size of the disk and it worked great.

 

[bdt]

.. the best way would be to get Partition Magic

..pfft! Why pay (we DO buy/pay for our commercial software, don't we?) when there's a perfectly free/GPL one that'll do the job at a much better price? (and no, I'm not just saying that, I HAVE tested it!)

 

[RSx]

..pfft! Why pay (we DO buy/pay for our commercial software, don't we?) when there's a perfectly free/GPL one that'll do the job at a much better price? (and no, I'm not just saying that, I HAVE tested it!)

LOL Didnt know about that

Well a "friend" came to my house and helped me out with PMagic

Is it windows based? Can it do NTFS partitions?

 

[AntiThesis]

.geek: There is a performance difference between my IDE, SATA and SATA II drives. What comes as a surprise to people though is that SATA II does not in fact mean 3Gb/s (double SATA) but is the name of an organisation

They still kick ass though.

See this link.

 

[|tera|]

Thanks for that one AntiThesis, I read it, but how do I actually tell if a drive I want to buy is 3gb/s ? I've come across a few retailers who don't note the specifications, it's a pretty stupid question I know, but try and answer in nonetheless

 

[.geek]

.geek: There is a performance difference between my IDE, SATA and SATA II drives. What comes as a surprise to people though is that SATA II does not in fact mean 3Gb/s (double SATA) but is the name of an organisation

They still kick ass though.

See this link.

Thanks, will read..