are these any good?
 

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...144-122&depa=1

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduc...104-214&DEPA=0

i'm hoping to get these ordered sometime today. my dad's having some problems ordering them. some errors or something like that. but are these any good though?

i'd get the 120 or 160 gig model hdd's for $20 - $30 more

bother than that their both good.

i don't need an 80 gig but it's only $10 more than the 40 gig. and i'm on a somewhat older computer. so i wouldn't really want the 120 or 160 gig yet.

I'm kinda partial to Seagate myself. I'm going to put a 200GB Barracuda in my new system. Gods, I can't wait to get it built!

The 80gb WD hard drive you linked to is the exact model that I replaced just a matter of days ago in this computer. I didn't replace it because it failed, but because it was giving me the click of death for about two months straight. That thing worked hard up until the very end, and I was very pleased with it. Even though it's time was growing close, it never failed me. That drive had some mad spin hours on it, too. I highly recommend it. :)

Also, I replaced it with the WD2000JB model... a 200gb version. Love it.

my dad got the order confirmed. i should be getting it before the end of the week. i'm getting that raid controller too. i need more IDE channels. right now i have 3 cd drives on 2 IDE channels. i'm so happy. how long did you have the drive sarge?

If I recall correctly, I had that drive for over a year and a half. My dad had put it in this computer before he gave it to me, and it was only a couple months old when I got it. I know that a year and a half doesn't sound like a long time for a hard drive, but this one had some serious spin hours on it. I used to leave my computer on for several weeks at a time, and the hard drives would almost never spin down. So, I think it faired really well... all things considered. :)

2 weeks seems to be the limit on my computer without turning it off. after 2 weeks its unstable most of the time. i have an old WD Caviar 22100 in my computer right now. i've kept it spinning for a couple of months straight pretty much with the occasional restart. i've been doing that since i got this computer. it started making a high pitched noise for a while but i guess it stopped now. but the drive is still going. it's like 8 years old or something.

Damn. That's a hella long time. Sounds like yours did better than mine.

i don't push my drives too hard either. i don't always play games all the time. even when i do they aren't very taxing on the system or the drive.

Well, I kept Winamp and all my music on that drive, so the random access rates on it were rediculous. Conditions like that are very condusive to the dreaded click of death. :p :)

i've heard that making it boot from the raid card is a pain in the butt. is that true? i want to be able to boot from that so i can take out my current drive. what exactly does the click of death sound like?

The click of death is when your drive comes to a complete stop all the way from 7200rpm, making a clicking sound in the process... and after that, it slowly spins back up to speed.

that's bad. sounds like the motor went bad or a bearing broke or something.

Not sure what exactly causes it to hang up like that, but whatever it is, it's not good. :)

sounds like it could have lasted longer if it didn't do the clicking thing. did you try puting it on its side and running it like that?

Ya know, I never even thought to do that. Of course, my computer is a tower, and it's got specific slots for the hard drives, so it'd take a little modification to mount them vertically. I'll see what I can do, though. Thanks for the idea. :)

i think running drives like that may take some pressure off of certain parts in the drive. my computer is a tower as well. it's fun to work with because there isn't any screws on the case or cd drive trays. i come up with some strange ideas sometimes. and they sometimes work too. except that time i put the IDE cables on backwards.

maybe you could put the drive in upside down and try that as well.

I'll take a look at possible set ups later this week. Right now, I should be in bed seeing as how it's 00:25, and I have to be up for work in four hours. :igor:

yes. get some sleep sarge. it's still only 10:30 over here.

You'd think puting a HD on its side would be better for it, since gravity wouldnt be "warping" the disks. I mean they say its best to store CD's verticaly for this reason. i'd think it'd be the same kinda thing.

I never thought of that. My network server is actually a notebook PC that I keep sitting on it's side because of convenience (it's easiest to store that way on my entertainment center). So I've been running my HD "on edge" for months now. I hope it will extend it's life (or just prevent problems along the way).

As for brands of hard drives, I've been a fan of Western Digital drives for many years. Most recently I purchased a 250 GB external (USB 2.0/Firewire) WD hard drive (7200 RPM, 8 MB cache), and I love it. It's still too early to determine longevity, but I CAN say that it's fast and quiet.

RAID controllers for PCs I don't know about, though.

i got my hard drive and RAID controller today. my computer has so much more speed and space than it used to. my old drive was a 2.1 gig WD. my new drive is about 40 times bigger than the old one.

Spiffy. :)

it sure is. now i don't have to uninstall stuff when i want to install other stuff or download stuff.

did you get the one I linked too?

which did you link too?

about 14430 Power On Hours later, it's still running as it did when i first installed it.

I use a lot of computers with a lot of drives - they're all on all the time, unless of course one gets sluggish, in which case it just gets an immediate restart.

Either way, most of the drives are Maxtor, a couple Western Digital, and the externals are iOmega.

Some of these drives have been virtually non-stop for more than half a decade and show no signs of wear (at least nothing that I notice). Two (one in garage, one in boat shed) are even exposed to below-freezing temperatures in the winter and still work. I have yet to scrap a hard drive because it failed (unless it was used and d.o.a. when I received it).

Is this uncommon? Am I lucky, or do drives just usually last a long time? Most are paralell to ground, only a couple are vertical.

I was hoping this was a thread about boobs. :(

It's not generally a good thing to have a optical drive and a HD on the same IDE channel. Also, It's generally better to have a motherboard with raid built in, which is many nowadays. What you're doing is fine, though.

Try here and see if you get what you want.

swingdjted, i have some drives that have been pretty much nonstop since 1998. not to mention that the machine in question still is on it's original install of windows 98 first edition without ever a reformat.

I guess what we're saying is that just about any hard drive will last long - I haven't seen any evidence that suppports that one brand lasts longer than another. I've had equal luck with all three brands that I have.

Usually I get my drives by getting used computers that people consider dead, so I'll often just reformat before even checking if it is good or not. Once that's done, I usually don't have to do it again.

my 486 still has it's original HD and it's still going strong.

I've been running a 20GB Fujitsu drive in my station computer for 27 months, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.. no problems at all, standing vertically. No problems yet ;)

I hate WD. Had a 100G die and lost a lot of data. It was replaced under a 3yr warranty. The 60G WD I got to use while the drive was being replaced died on day 367 of a one year warranty. The Seagate I got to replace that has run with no problems from day one.

I had eight (Count 'em, EIGHT!) WD drives go bad in a NEW server. (Bad SMART reporting of Temperatures that forced the box to shut down). Those two sets of 4 WD's got replaced with 4 Seagates that are running 20+ degrees cooler than the WDs.

I will never again knowingly buy a WD. I am honestly shocked to hear any good words about them as no one I know personally has had a good experience.

Change of my position after two years...

I've heard quite a few people say they are happy with WD drives. But in my 15+ years in IT across many different industries, WD has come to be proven fairly unreliable compared to other brands. Note that this differs from my last post in this thread from a couple of years back. More experience compiled over a longer period of time has caused me to change my opinion.

Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi and Quantum are brands trusted more commonly by professional IT departments. Western Digital drives are not trusted as often by the companies I've worked with (>100 in all). They are commonly considered "consumer-level" products, not generally suited for mission-critical applications. I used to be happy with WD drives for my home use, but have since found the need for more consistent reliability. The WD drive I purchased just before my last post in this thread - like many others - died a couple of months after installation.

Many home users report no problems with WD drives, so I'm not saying "WD drives suck". It's a matter of degree and required reliability of the user. In my experience early failure (long before MTBF) of WD drives is much more common per capita - measured across thousands of home and corporate users - than the other brands I list in the previous paragraph.

For one of the last companies I worked with, I helped to manage 220 Compaq Blade servers and a dedicated SAN, utilizing over 500 Seagate HDDs. In the first year, none failed.

In the year before that - in the same server environment - more than 20 Western Digital drives that were less than a year old bit the dust and had to be replaced. For this reason we stopped buying WD. At least ten of my other large business partner companies in the past several years have had to do the same thing.

Of the better brands, Seagate in particular is like IBM of old..."No one ever got fired for buying IBM", referring to IBM's long history of reliability. Well, I'd venture that no one ever got fired for buying Seagate for the same reason. It's the defacto standard for most companies I've worked with for most of my career, and provides home users with equally consistent reliability.

(Although I currently run Hitachi drives on my home 1.02 TB network, with perfect reliability so far over the past two years with 24/7 uptime and heavy disk usage.)

Interesting scor. I was thinking of buying WD for my new box because, well that's what I've always used. I think seagate is going to be my new standard.