[ale] difference among Seagate, WesternDigital & Maxtor ?

[Scott Castaline]

Courtney Thomas wrote:

>Scott,
>
>This somewhat mirrors my experience with hard drives. I started using quite a 
>few Maxtor's about 10 years ago and was pleased with performance and 
>durability [and price]. Recently I'm having drives going down a lot, of all 
>flavors, and have found any tape drive I can afford expensive, cumbersome and 
>unreliable too.
>
>So, on my net am running several Linux flavors from CD at the moment, though 
>not happily.
>
>I also have an old RedHat server that is hardware raided but don't run it 
>much.
>
>So, I'm looking for a couple of sizable, at least a couple hundred MBs, hard 
>drives that I can reliably [and affordably] raid, somehow. I've read that 
>[IIRC] Escalade raid cards are good. But I have no objection to software raid 
>in that reliability and avoiding data loss are what I'm after, with 
>performance last, at least in this instance. 
>
>Your thoughts appreciated,
>
>Courtney
>
>
>On Tuesday 25 October 2005 09:53, Scott Castaline wrote:
>  
>
>>tejus at vijedi.net wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>I've never had a hard-drive fail (knocks on wood) but for a desktop
>>>system, I'd take seagate over everything else.  The reason? Noise.
>>>
>>>The seagate's are barely audible when idling and just a soft tapping when
>>>active.  My maxtor's sound like a high-speed notebook fan while idling and
>>>like somebody using one of those old IBM "clicky" keyboards when it's
>>>actually doing work.
>>>
>>>The few WD drives I have are in noisy and/or out of the way places, so I
>>>don't know how they compare.
>>>
>>>
>>>Tejus
>>>
>>>Courtney Thomas writes:
>>>      
>>>
>>>>I need a new IDE drive and apparently Seagate, Western Digital and
>>>>Maxtor have it to themselves, though I'm receptive if others are more
>>>>for less.
>>>>
>>>>Is there any significant difference among them that I should be aware
>>>>of, or just get the biggest I can find for the least cost ?
>>>>
>>>>Appreciatively,
>>>>
>>>>Courtney
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>>>>        
>>>>
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>>>      
>>>
>>I tend to stay away from Maxtor eversince they had bought out
>>Miniscribe. Their lowend stuff is really Miniscribe while the highend
>>stuff is Maxtor (SCSI UW320 etc). Having worked for Seatrash, excuse me,
>>Seagate may years ago at the start of the offshore manufacturing crase (
>>we called it the Singapore Sling ), at one of their repair depot centers
>>in Delray Beach, Fl. I had seen supposed new drives made in Singapore
>>that did not have disks in them, some were missing heads, some the bands
>>for the head to stepper motor connection, and some were just shells with
>>no guts. This was also at the time of the Seagate aquisition of Imprimus
>>a division CDC who made HDs for mainframes and up. Imprimus was pretty
>>much left alone and their drives became the highend lines for Seagate.
>>So to make a long story short or a short story long, I tend to stick
>>with WD and Quantum, although they have been gobbled up by Maxtor,
>>so.....................
>>
>>Scott Castaline
>>_______________________________________________
>>Ale mailing list
>>Ale at ale.org
>>http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>>    
>>
>
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>
>  
>
I too use software RAID a lot on my home systems. On my SuSe box I have 
2 9GB Quantums UW160 SCSI and 2 36GB Quantums UW160 SCSI that are set up 
with RAID 1 mirrored. My other box has all WD drives in it running 
Linspire/Ubuntu also RAID 1. My wife's box has a Samsung and a WD 
running M$ Windoze 2K without RAID, since that costs. Back in my days of 
employment, in most situations I dealt with hardware RAID solutions and 
usually used Adaptec Adapters with very little trouble.

Scott Castaline