Need STABLE STABLE well built hard drive

[pomme]

Alwright, money is not an issue, to me the most important part of my computer is the hard drive.

Speed is important, low noise (when used and idle), low temperatures, SCSI,
but one thing that I find hard to research is the stability and robustness of the drives that are out there.

Which one will never screw-up on me? And which one will always maintain speed overtime without needing to defragment?

-pomme-

[juan-sanchez]

On the robustnes score I'd say buy a Quantum, they're quiet in use generally too, due to top quality bearings.

As for the 'no defragmenting', I'd say why not defrag ?.....whilst not as important these days, generally it's still good practice.

[pomme]

When you say Quantum, you mean Maxtor Atlas right?

Defragmenting is something I want to avoid because it overheats SCSI drives. After ten minutes of intensive use, SCSI hard drives are too hot to touch. So why have the drive go through excessive heat when the speed improvements are nill? Well for some drives it's nill, for bad ones (like the IBMs) you constantly need to defragment too maintain speed.

But out of curiosity, do the Quantums (now Maxtor Atlas) maintain speed without defrag?

-pomme-

[snarg]

Well the only drives shipping from here that come into the cat are either the Seagate X15 and Fujitsu MAM3 15K both have 8MB buffers, both run as quiet as a mouse. Both drives run nice and cool and their seek/read time is completely wicked.

The Maxtor Atlas sounds like a snoring drunk when its under load personally we would only use these drives when the clients budget is under load and a tad stretched. The Fujitsu MAM3 10k drives are faser than the Maxtor Atlas III.

Ought else mail me directly as I am not in the forums daily

[gmask]

I would reccommend seagate drives... They generally last a long long time under rough conditions. Plus Seagate has always had a really easy online RMA system that makes replacing bad drives painless.

As far as maintaining speed overtime it really depends on the application. If youa re talking about Non Linear Editting then all drives will suffer as the drive nears it's capacity. Generally drives are written to from the inner edge to the outer edge. The diameter of the outer edge is larger so the head has to move farther. Fragmentation will allways be a problem on pretty much anything that spins. You could look into solid state drives if you are loaded with cash.. they are really quiet, fast and expensive.

[1000101-]

Seagate cheetah is a decent fast drive. As far as fragmentation; thats a filesystem/OS issue more than a hard drive brand issue. Quantum is a steaming pile of poo. allways has been. Quantum is what you sell your customers you don't want to have as customers anymore. If its a fast ultra160 drive its gonna be hot.
and theres no such thing as a drive that will never screw up. Hence the MTBF rating. if it makes you feel better I sitll have 2 seagate barricuda 9gb ultra wides from 1998 that I'm still using in a machine here.

[exodusmaximus]

You will always need to defrag the drive - if you use it

[marlio]

Buy a fast, quiet hard drive. Buy another one and a RAID card, run it at Level 1 (mirroring). Boom, twice the stability of any single HD.

[pomme]

Thanks for your responses.

Raid sounds interesting, any tips on a good SCSI raid controller.

-pomme-

[1000101-]

Adaptec makes a decent one
but actually
if your just doing RAID 1
you can do that at the OS level on a standard SCSI controller with almost no CPU overhead.
Only spend money onna RAID controller if you need to boot off a RAID 0 stripe (RAID 0 has practically no CPU overhead as well) or if you want RAID 3 or 5; or some other RAID leve with parity.

win2k can do RAID 1 with any 2 identical drives though..

[juan-sanchez]

Sorry, I forgot Quantum are Maxtor now : )

IS the card mentioned just above a 39160 ?...I've an acquaintance who's a distributor for adaptec & he highly recommended one recently........whether this was due to commission or what I don't know.

Pomme, have you looked at a solid state drive ?.......
I don't know exactly what the state of play on these things is, but that would solve a lot of your 'problem'....especially as cost isn't a consideration.

[1000101-]

I believe that 39160 just a standard SCSI card with 4 channels on it.
good stuff.

[ozz-2005]

In reply to:Quantum is a steaming pile of poo. allways has been. Quantum is what you sell your customers you don't want to have as customers anymore

funny you should say that. i got 2 quantum drives.
1 is 4 years old. the other is 1.
the newer one is actually working very well. i likes it a lot.
i went with quantum the second time around because from reading reviews it was still a very good but kinda loud drive.
the volume doesnt bother me as its not that loud due ot having a nice case that retains a lot of the noise.

but ill also be shopping for a new drive soon as im running low

[ripx]

for more information go to http://www.storagereview.com

[juan-sanchez]

"Seagate cheetah is a decent fast drive. As far as fragmentation; thats a filesystem/OS issue more than a hard drive brand issue. Quantum is a steaming pile of poo. allways has been. Quantum is what you sell your customers you don't want to have as customers anymore. If its a fast ultra160 drive its gonna be hot.
and theres no such thing as a drive that will never screw up. Hence the MTBF rating. if it makes you feel better I sitll have 2 seagate barricuda 9gb ultra wides from 1998 that I'm still using in a machine here. "

This, as with the other forums here, is a place for people to discuss matters that affect them in a professional manner, if you can't manage that, go elsewhere.
....oh yes, may I also suggest that you learn to use the English language correctly. I'm English and am proud of my mother tongue, please learn to spell, as I, and many others, find it highly offensive when someone such as yourself are incapable of stringing more than a few letters together without introducing easily avoidable errors.

- ignorant, crass, opinionated,  RRRRRRRRRRs.