Time to choose a Hard Drive -- WD, Maxtor, ....?

[eqmassa]

I?m almost finished choosing components for my new gaming rig (Barton 2500+, Abit NF7-S, Radeon 9800np) and must now choose a hard drive. The qualities I?m looking for are compatibility in regards to my setup (thus stability and long-term security) and speed in regards to gaming. I know that the HD isn?t a huge player in this (few mere gamers buy SCSIs), but with the new 10,000 RPM Serial ATA drives, the choices seem to be very complex. I?m not sure if I should even consider one of these new drives, but if it means substantial performance gains in gaming or higher stability, I will definitely do so.

In other areas, I know that I want an 8mb (or more, maybe) cache and at least 40gb of space (I will increase space based on price/upgrade ratio). I don?t want my computer to sound like a lawnmower, but a little noise is find if its worth it. I don?t have a specific spending range. Finally, I?m not going to deal with raid; one hard drive is all I?ll have ? easy installation would be nice. As for specific brands, I?ve read good things about everyone from Maxtor to Seagate to WD.

For the interested, here is Storage Review?s ranking chart: http://www.storagereview.com/php/be.../bench_sort.php

Also, this is probably the most useful thread I?ve found: http://forums.anandtech.com/message...hreadid=1121310

Thanks!

 

[Sheriff]

Hitachi's GXP180's are quiet and fast, have a 3yr warranty, plus come in a 8MB cache flavor.

 

[DaveSimmons]

WD for the warranty but some of them get noisy, Maxtor for a good balance of speed vs. noise but only a 1-year warranty on many models.

Not really much difference in games though, except when loading levels. Even then the real-world difference between a 7,200 RPM Maxtor vs. WD is going to be tiny and so is 7,200 vs 10,000. CPU, memory, and video card are much more important.

Most of the people claiming a "huge difference" in, for example,. moving from 2MB cache to 8MB are feeling the "placebo effect" (google if you don't know what it is). Real-world differences in games are going to be tiny or nonexistent.

So your best bet might be to pick up whatever has the best price in Hot Deals.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: Sheriff
Hitachi's GXP180's are quiet and fast, have a 3yr warranty, plus come in a 8MB cache flavor.

Yes, Hitachi are good choices too, along with Samsung. There aren't really any "bad" brands right now, people who refuse to buy brand X are just holding grudges from years-ago bad models or from having bad luck with that brand (which happens for all brands).

 

[Pacinamac23]

I agree the speed differences are nill. I switched from a 60gig Maxtor diamond plus 9 7200rpm 2mb cache to a WDJB120 (7200rpm, 8mb cache).

I did notice a difference but it was very very small. Maybe a second or two at most off loading times. I find having more ram (IE 512 > 1024) makes a bigger difference in loading times.

Go for things like reliability, noise and temp.

 

[Schadenfroh]

i went from a 5400 rpm 2mb buffer maxtor to a 10,000 rpm 8mb buffer WD, night and day differance

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
i went from a 5400 rpm 2mb buffer maxtor to a 10,000 rpm 8mb buffer WD, night and day differance

People say this, but so much is subjective when you haven't done benchmarks and have made other changes such as adding memory and are using a freshly defragged drive (as a side effect of switching).

People think their $10/foot speaker wire sounds better than 25 cent/foot Radio Shack cable, until they take a double-blind test and are forced to admit they can't tell the two apart.

 

[sellmen]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
i went from a 5400 rpm 2mb buffer maxtor to a 10,000 rpm 8mb buffer WD, night and day differance

People say this, but so much is subjective when you haven't done benchmarks and have made other changes such as adding memory and are using a freshly defragged drive (as a side effect of switching).

People think their $10/foot speaker wire sounds better than 25 cent/foot Radio Shack cable, until they take a double-blind test and are forced to admit they can't tell the two apart.

I think in this case though, the decreased seek times would be significant, and there would be a noticable difference.

I tend to like Maxtor drives; the speed is very comparible to WD drives, but all my WD drives have developed the annoying ball-bearing motor whine after a few months. The Maxtors idle noise is inaudible, and in quiet mode, the seeks are extremely quiet as well.

 

[ProUser]

I went from Raid 0 with 2 7200rpm 2meg drives to a Raid 0 with 2 10,000rpm Raptors.

Difference is night and day. Benchmarks show a huge performance increase. You could blindfold me all day long I could point out the difference in a heartbeat.

 

[BG4533]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
i went from a 5400 rpm 2mb buffer maxtor to a 10,000 rpm 8mb buffer WD, night and day differance

People say this, but so much is subjective when you haven't done benchmarks and have made other changes such as adding memory and are using a freshly defragged drive (as a side effect of switching).

People think their $10/foot speaker wire sounds better than 25 cent/foot Radio Shack cable, until they take a double-blind test and are forced to admit they can't tell the two apart.

I benchmarked comparable fresh installs of XP on the same computer with Atto. With an IBM 60GXP I received max transfer speeds of ~25mbps. With a raptor I got around 45-50. With 2 raptors in RAID0 I got around 90mbps. The computer feels all around more peppy and everything happens faster. In my opinion these HDs make more difference than many upgrades.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I benchmarked comparable fresh installs of XP on the same computer with Atto. With an IBM 60GXP I received max transfer speeds of ~25mbps. With a raptor I got around 45-50. With 2 raptors in RAID0 I got around 90mbps. The computer feels all around more peppy and everything happens faster. In my opinion these HDs make more difference than many upgrades.

60GXP = 5400 RPM and lower data density than a new 7200 RPM drives, but ignoring that, "feels all around more peppy" is still pretty subjective compared to something like "UT2003 startup time went from 27 seconds to 12" or "level load times in Wolfenstein dropped from 8 seconds to 4."

Raw drive performance differences are like 3DMark scores, they don't necessarily mean anything for real-world activities like playing real games. And after you saw the huge benchmark increase you were expecting windows to "feel snappier" so witrhout application benchmarks it's hard to say how big the gain really was.

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you (like most people singing the praises of 8MB cache and/or 10,000 RPM) haven't really provided hard evidence of how much the real difference is.

 

[eqmassa]

Thread hijack in progress . I'm not going to do RAID, and my system is primarily for gaming. 7200 RPM will probably do it, and I need reliability, stability, and ease of installation/formatting.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: eqmassa
Thread hijack in progress . I'm not going to do RAID, and my system is primarily for gaming. 7200 RPM will probably do it, and I need reliability, stability, and ease of installation/formatting.

Then an old style IDE not SATA, and size up to 120 GB will be hassle-free. You can use the manufacturer "disk manager" to format, or your OS or boot diskette/fdisk (FAT32, up to 80 GB). Any brand should be fine, WD has a small edge in speed (probably not enough to matter) while a Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung will be a little cooler & quieter.

 

[eqmassa]

Well, it looks like Maxtor/WD/Seagate are close performers and all very reliable and Seagate is the quietest. Sadly, it does lag behind in a few tests. Hmm.

 

[Amdalltheway]

just get an 80gb 7200rpm maxtor hd with 8mb of cache, going for really cheap now

 

[Hankysmoo]

get whatever's cheaper

 

[Hankysmoo]

get whatever's cheaper