Which HD to get?

[bhess]

Looking at these hard drives.
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduct.asp?submit=manufactory&catalog=14&manufactory=1304&DEPA=1

The one with the "L" says

The letter "L" contained in the model number denotes that this drive was manufactured in Japan with a Fluid Dynamic Motor.

From maxtors site.
http://maxtor.com/Maxtorhome.htm

[bhess]

I posted this on the other site too If you don't mind. ;)

[Axel]

the L designation does look interesting -

As Quantum is no more - and Maxtor bought them - I'd say you're looking in the right direction - Pretty much the only other manufacturer that has any of my trust is Seagate

I've had too much trouble with western digital drives.... fuji & samsung - well, ok for budget, but not for me - and IBM has too many glaring failures in the hard drive dept. I've had to fix too many with micro code patches and there have been some noted bad batches......

20GB is a good size and fits the bill for 99% of the users out there. They don't make anything smaller anymore for desktop models as far as I know and the 20's are quickly coming to a close as well. This time next year and you probably won't see anything new at less than 40 GB.

$69 is a good price for that drive. I'd go for it if I needed a new one.

7200RPM and a 2MB onboard cache is pretty much bare minimum for me these days. Anything less really isn't worth my time anymore.

now if money was no object - I'd be looking into solid state RAM drives - no moving parts - super fast - but $16,000.00 for a 3GB drive is a bit beyond my range at this point.:bunny:

[bhess]

Actually I hadn't deceided to get the 40 or 60 gb yet. I was more curious about that "L" part. I like maxtor and unless a really good deal comes along I want to stick with them.
Who makes them with more than 2MB cache? I thought that was standard?
I'm actually shooting around the idea of getting two and trying out RAID but I'm not sure if it's really worth it.
"I'd be looking into solid state RAM drives "

If ram were to drop again I will try a ramdrive for sure.

[Axel]

as an alternative to tedious back-up schemes, you really cannot beat running IDE RAID mirroring and have 3 hard drives - 1 perminant - and two in hot swap carridges so that the system will automatically completely mirror a perfect copy when you are ready. So you build your system with the one fixed and one hot swap drive - when you're satisfied that you won't be making any changes any thime soon - you take the hot swap tray out - replace it with the blank drive and let the raid system build your blank drive out. You take the original hot swap drive and place it in an anti-static bag and pop it on the shelf - if anything happens to the system, replace the bad drive with the one in the anti-static bag - and wa-la - back to square one in minutes instead of days.....

You'll want to look up promise technologies on the web for ide RAID adapters -

that and a giga-byte motherboard with a dual BIOS on it and there is almost no way you'd be out of action for more than an afternoon in the worst of cases - barring fire that is ;-)

as for the 2MB cache - true - I haven't noticed anything larger than that - but have come across a lot of drives with less cache - some as small as 256.....

[bhess]

I have the KT7-A So that's another reason to try RAID.
There is no way I could go through the expense of 3 hard drives. Unless I can crash at your place when I get kicked out of the house. :D
I have also thought about getting a drive inclosure too.

[NDC]

Yeah, I've don't think there are any IDE interface hard disk drives with any over 2MB cache. As for SCSI, 4MB are easy to find.

As for KT7A-RAID performance, I wouldn't go for it... You can read the reason why not if you'd like...

RAID SETUP - SPEED GAIN? (http://www.techimo.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=12845&pagenumber=1)

[bhess]

Thanks NDC. What I don't understand is why is RAID so popular then? And for that matter why is SCSI so expensive?

[NDC]

In my opinion, the reason IDE RAID is so popular is because it's an inexpensive way to get performance gains using inexpensive IDE drives. Another is because of the bloated reviews on them. benchmarks may show better performance, but actual usage barely showed it in my case. And yes, I do use some applications that require heavy disk I/O. And as one of the members mentioned at the link above, in some cases, it does cause hiccups on certain games. I'm assuming this is ocurring because of the CPU utilization that it requires to write and read to multiple disk simutaneously.

As for the higher cost on SCSI disks, it's more expensive because of the SCSI chip on the hard disk. A SCSI 7200rpm drive is basically the same thing as an IDE 7200rpm. The difference is the SCSI chip that's on the hard disk itself which acts as a CPU dedicated to just the disk. Therefore, SCSI disks don't rely on the the CPU as much as IDE drives do. But the main reason for the big price difference would be because SCSI drives are in less demand. SCSI hard disks are mostly used in servers and high-end workstations. SCSI hard disks have dropped much compared to just a year ago. I paid about $700 USD for my Seagate Cheetah U160 10,000rpm drive. Now they can be bought for under $200 USD for the same hard disk...

The only conclussion I've come to is that a single SCSI 10,000rpm drive will tear up an IDE-RAID-0 7200rpm setup... The seek times on are much lower on SCSI 10K's. Just imagine running a single SCSI 15K drive or even a SCSI RAID-0 on SCSI 15K drives! :eek:

[Axel]

simple answer is that ide - you are limited to 4 relatively slow pieces of hardware - SCSI - you can chain as many as 7 or, in some cases 10 items on one long ribbon..... that's why you have these server cases with 15 slots in it.....

[FalcomPSX]

WesterDigital 120BB Special Edition drives have 8MB cache...performance is awesome, so it the price unfortunately, nearly $400 some places.

[jadison]

I'll consider running raid possibly in the near future, but as of now there is no need for it. BTW, FalcomPSX was right about that HD w/8MB cache...I think there's possibly a few others w/8MB cache as well.

As for HD's, I've used Western Digital for almost 11 years and haven't experienced any real problems w/them. Although I cannot argue that Maxtor HD's are one of the best...in fact THG's (Tom's Hardware Guide) Reader's Choice Awards found that the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 60 won 1st place (Click Here for More Info (http://www4.tomshardware.com/column/02q1/020219/rc2001-06.html)).
In fact, my next HD purhcase will be a Maxtor DiamondMax to go along w/my current 40GB Western Digital Caviar.

As for RAID, you'll find an interesting article titled "RAID With 2.5" Hard Drives: Quick And Quiet" that contains a lot of useful info worth checking out HERE (http://www.tomshardware.com/newsletter/vol2/7/raid.html).

[bhess]

Thanks all. I've deceided to get the 6L060L3. 60GB with the L.
Jad that article is almost a year old. :p
Created:
March 12, 2001

[jadison]

The article that THG wrote is dated 2/20/2002...so I don't know where u got that date.

BTW, nice choice on the HD! :)

[bhess]

I correct my self. The article you linked says
Created:
February 19, 2002
but if you click on the diamondmax 60 link on the article it was a year old. Strange..........

[jadison]

Hmmm...tis strange.
Well, as long as you were able to read the article and gain something from it, that's all that matters. :)
Otherwise, I was just pointing it out because it seemed interesting and had a slight reference to what the subject of this thread was.