indyjones

Well my replacement seagate 7200.10 drive has just started to fail, the bearing has gone and it won't complete a short drive self test

Going to contact scan tomorrow and see if I can return both drives (the replacement one and another), I no longer trust the 7200.10 model.
If I can swap both what drive do you guys recommend? I was thinking of a pair of western digital 500Gb GP drives. I will am running windows home server (2003).

Cheers

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roirraW "edor" ehT

Sorry to hear about your bad luck with SeaGate lately.

Well, I'm not convinced the WD GP drives are worth it. NewEgg has several people who've bought that drive who noticed there is some strange vibration from the hard drive. Also it's noted that there is an access delay due to the IntelliPark feature. At least a couple people also said it's pretty loud when when there's heavy activity. Overall on NewEgg it gets four out of five eggs with 43 ratings.

If I were in the market and trying to avoid SeaGate for now (although I've had similar random problems with brand new WD hard drives too, but those were the exception to the rule), I would consider Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM. This one gets five out of five eggs with 348 ratings.

That is the highest-rated 500GB+ SATA2 hard drive on NewEgg right now.

Of course, I'm less concerned with noise in all of my computers; I like everything to run at full speed all the time. I do let my CPU throttle on my Vista Ultimate Media Center, though.

Good luck and happy hard drive hunting!

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LordOfLA

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...10005N1D1AS-RK)

or

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...OEM%20(HD103UJ)

with the samsung being faster and better £/GB ratio

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rotjong

I purchased a number of drives a few months ago and it came down to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 750 GB or the Samsung SpinPoint F1 750 GB. I ended up going with the Seagate drives. From everything I've read and heard the Samsung drives while speed demons are also more prone to failure.

I was drawn to the WD GP drives due to their lower power usage, reduced heat, etc. I like being green and I also prefer a cooler system. The Seagate 7200.11 drives are decent in terms of lower power usage as well having the 32 MB buffer that you won't get on the WD drives let alone WD GP ones. You also have the increased price simply because the WD drives are the GP model.

I should also note that I have been a WD fan for years so I did look closely at the WD drives first. In the end I just couldn't go with WD due to the price point, the lack of the 32 MB cache, and comparing the reviews performance-wise.

I'm very happy with the perfomance of thes Seagate 7200.11 drives.

roirraW "edor" ehT

I've only personally owned one Samsung hard drive which was a PATA 160GB. It eventually failed mechanically and it was possibly just under the three year warranty but I never pursued it. Admittedly, I was using it as an external drive via USB2 to a 366 MHz laptop, so the hard drive might have been thrashed very hard.

The best-rated 32MB cache hard drive on NewEgg is Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3250310NS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM.

For twice the price you can get a Seagate SV35.3 ST3750330SV 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM with three times the space, but look at the difference in seek and write times!

On the 250GB, On the 750GB, The 7200.11 is the third rated.

I put two 320GB 32MB cache SeaGates in someone's computer (RAID 0) several months ago and haven't had any complaints yet. Don't know the precise model though; it's not available through NewEgg any more.

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indyjones

Thanks for the replies.
The drives will have to be 500GB as they will be size for size swaps I would expect. Anyway I am going to phone at lunch time as see what they say, hopefully I can send both back (faulty and non faulty) and trade for a different manufacturer/ model if not I will just try to swap the faulty one. Will see what they have to say......

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