Western Digital, Maxtor, or IBM/Hitachi ?

[Jerry]

I'm looking at a new hard drive, 80 GB (or larger), 7200 RPM, 8 MB
buffer and at least a 3 year warranty. I can go with EIDE or SATA but
leaning towards SATA. I have read many of the reviews which essentially
say any one of these three is best on any given day. However, the
reviews don't address reliability. I like what I see on the WD360GD,
especially with its 5 year warranty, but it's a little small. The
WD740GD is not out yet and the price may be beyond my budget.
BTW, I'm not interested in SCSI.
What is your experience/opinion of Western Digital, Maxtor or IBM/Hitachi?
1) Has Hitachi fixed the problems IBM was having?
2) Which company has the best warranty service if things go wrong?
3) Are the fluid bearing motors that much quieter (inside a PC case
with multiple fans)?
4) If you like Seagate (or another make), why?
5) Which review site do you like?

TIA, Jerry

 

[Don_B]

I had more than one Maxtor 40 gig fail on me. The good news is that for the
Maxtor warranty, you just look up the model number and they cover that model
number until a certain date. No receipts necessary. The bad news is that the
shipping requirements are stringent and you don't have your hard drive.
Based on reading these boards and other industry material, I think that all
of the drive manufactures have at one time or another produced products with
problems. I would not say that my experience with Maxtor is current as it
happened more than a year ago. I use Western Digital now and no problems so
far.

 

[Wooducoodu]

none of the above. take a look at the Samsung SP1614N (IDE) or the SP1614C
(SATA).

 

[Ric]

I'm looking at a new hard drive, 80 GB (or larger), 7200 RPM, 8 MB
buffer and at least a 3 year warranty. I can go with EIDE or SATA but
leaning towards SATA. I have read many of the reviews which
essentially say any one of these three is best on any given day.
However, the reviews don't address reliability. I like what I see on
the WD360GD, especially with its 5 year warranty, but it's a little
small. The WD740GD is not out yet and the price may be beyond my
budget.
BTW, I'm not interested in SCSI.
What is your experience/opinion of Western Digital, Maxtor or
IBM/Hitachi? 1) Has Hitachi fixed the problems IBM was having?
2) Which company has the best warranty service if things go wrong?
3) Are the fluid bearing motors that much quieter (inside a PC case
with multiple fans)?
4) If you like Seagate (or another make), why?
5) Which review site do you like?

TIA, Jerry

western digital JB "caviar" with 8mb cache. quiet, fast, reliable. go sata
if you've got a sata connector - doesn't make much difference.

 

[Steven Scharf]

I'm looking at a new hard drive, 80 GB (or larger), 7200 RPM, 8 MB
buffer and at least a 3 year warranty. I can go with EIDE or SATA but
leaning towards SATA. I have read many of the reviews which essentially
say any one of these three is best on any given day. However, the
reviews don't address reliability. I like what I see on the WD360GD,
especially with its 5 year warranty, but it's a little small. The
WD740GD is not out yet and the price may be beyond my budget.
BTW, I'm not interested in SCSI.
What is your experience/opinion of Western Digital, Maxtor or IBM/Hitachi?
1) Has Hitachi fixed the problems IBM was having?
2) Which company has the best warranty service if things go wrong?
3) Are the fluid bearing motors that much quieter (inside a PC case
with multiple fans)?
4) If you like Seagate (or another make), why?
5) Which review site do you like?

I also wonder about your question #1. I used to use IBM drives until
they started having problems and I don't know if Hitachi has fixed
them.

Since then I've used a bunch of Maxtor drives without incident over a
period of four years or so. However I'm very careful to add hard drive
coolers to all the systems I build, and keeping the drive cool makes a
big difference in its lifetime. The 7200 and 10,000 RPM drives run
quite hot. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with WD or
Seagate. Knock on wood, but the last hard drive I had that failed was
a Maxtor 80MB ESDI drive!

Check out http://svc.com for hard drive cooling solutions.