14.6 Our Picks
Over the years, we've used hard
drives from many manufacturers, including Fujitsu, IBM, Maxtor,
Quantum, Samsung, Seagate, Western Digital, and others. All of them
have made some excellent drives and some mediocre ones, but over the
last few years we've come to depend exclusively on
Seagate (http://www.seagate.com)
and Maxtor (http://www.maxtor.com) drives for their
performance and reliability.
- ATA hard drive
-
Seagate or Maxtor.
If you need an ATA drive, choose a
Seagate or Maxtor model of the appropriate size and speed. Both
companies offer multiple lines of ATA drives, from 5,400 RPM value
models through 7,200 RPM performance models. One of them is almost
certainly ideal for your needs. We no longer use Western Digital hard
drives because we experienced multiple premature drive failures with
various Western Digital models. Although we have never had a
premature drive failure with an IBM IDE hard drive, enough of our
readers have reported severe problems with some IBM models that we
avoid them as well. We don't have sufficient data to
judge the reliability of Samsung models. Our experience is that
Seagate and Maxtor ATA drives are fast, inexpensive, and reliable, so
that's what we use and recommend.
- SCSI hard disk
-
Seagate Barracuda and Cheetah series.
The 7,200 RPM Barracuda drives, formerly
Seagate's midrange SCSI line, are now their
entry-level SCSI drives. The Barracuda blows the doors off the
fastest ATA drives, compares favorably in our testing to competing
models from other makers, is incredibly reliable, and is remarkably
inexpensive. When we need even higher disk performance, we install a
10,000 or 15,000 RPM Seagate Cheetah. We've used
Seagate SCSI drives in our personal systems for years, as well as in
workstations and servers owned by clients. Seagate SCSI drives are
fast, quiet, cool, have extremely low failure rates, and are
competitively priced. There's not much more you can
ask for in a SCSI drive.
For detailed current recommendations by brand and model, visit:
- http://www.hardwareguys.com/picks/harddisk.html
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