Advice on hard drives?

[dr4b]

Hey, does anyone know about hard drives? That is, do you all know more than I do about hard drives? It can't be hard to, since I know very little.

Since I'm so deadly paranoid about my hard drive since the last time it blew up and Roman saved the day for me, I decided to go get a new hard drive before my current one dies. (I don't actually think my current one is anywhere near dying, and I was actually thinking I might use it as a backup now that I have a new one.)

My old one's a Maxtor 40GB drive. My new one's a Seagate 80GB drive, 7200 RPM ATA/IDE blah blah blah. But I honestly can't remember what I've heard about Seagate. So can one of you hard drive gurus enlighten me? Am I doomed? Should I go exchange it before it blows up my system?

Comments

[thatenglishguy.livejournal.com]

Seagate drives are OK, if it's new you should have any problems, it probably one has a one year warranty, but that's unfortunately becoming the standard. My current preference is Western Digital drives due to their performance and the tendency for them to have large rebates at retail. IBM/Hitachi are also very good, they've had problems in the past, but all seems good again now. Maxtor drives are generally cheaper than the rest and I'm told there's a reason for that, I wouldn't buy one. I've had a Seagate drive in the past and it was fine. I think now they have some of the quietest drives and appear to be well respected. StorageReview.com (http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200306/20030615ST3160023A_1.html) believes the current models to be a "safe buy".

[rmitz.livejournal.com]

Whereas I use almost exclusively maxtor drives, and am biased against WD. :)

Basically, all the drives are pretty good these days, except for the occasional bad batch.

[kieferskunk.livejournal.com]

I ran into one bad batch of WD SATA 10000-RPM drives recently - got two in a row that started grinding their bearings within the first 10 days. Not a very loud sound, but still a really ugly one.

But bad batches will happen to anyone. I think IBM has had the worst luck in recent years - they're reputed to have an entire line with low reliability, but I think that time has passed as well. Hard to say.