Running out of HD space (again)

[Submeg]

Not too bad on storage space, I have 1.1TB atm, and as I don't download stuff like you guys I don't fill them at all. Have a stack of space

[Harrison]

HD prices seem to have dropped again, which is great.

A Samsung 1TB drive is now £80! I would normally go for Seagate though, but they are £93 for 1TB.

You can also now get a 1.5TB drive for £113, which is a good price when you see that 500GB drives are still about £50.

[Demon Cleaner]

Don't you like Samsung disks? I know that Zyriax only buys Samsung disks, as they are the cheapest and very reliable too. And 1TB for 80£ is really cheap, even 93£ is cheap imo.

[Harrison]

I have nothing against Samsung drives, and I like Samsung products for everything else. It's just that until now I normally buy Seagate drives as they are very reliable and very quiet.

[svebbe]

Western Digital4Life

[Harrison]

I never touch WD drives. Noisier than Samsung or Seagate by a long way, and they run hotter. WD drives are resonably reliable, though in recent surveys not as reliable as Seagate.

I did used to always buy Maxtor drives, until I had some problems with a 300GB SATA1 Maxtor drive that was incompatible with an Asus motherboard. I then switched to Seagate drives at that point and they were noticeably quieter than the Maxtor drives had been, and faster access times too! Now I normally buy Seagate, although with Samsung drives now being cheaper, and reading lots of great things about them, I think I will be trying those out next.

But the drives everyone says to avoid are Hitachi. There are lots of reports of reliability issues based on many people posting bad experiences with them. However the same was said when the same drives used to be made by IBM, and I used to use IBM Deskstar drives and never had any problems with them. They were nicknamed Deathstar's due to the supposed unreliability.

And both of my old 60GB and 120GB IBM Deskstar drives are still in use today. The 60GB drive must now 8 or 9 years old! I originally bought it as an upgrade to my then main system (a P2 400MHz PC) back in maybe 2000/01. It ran using a bios patch to trick the motherboard to see more than 33GB, and the drive firmware needed updating before newer system could see the drive when I moved it from that system to a newer one. I was quite impressed with the continued support for such an aging HDD.

And the 120GB IBM drive is the system drive in my server! Running 24/7 for years now.

So it just goes to show that reports of reliability and certain makes are not always correct.

[Buleste]

I don't care who makes them as long as they work. However my poor old 12 year old c Drive is starting to show bad sectors and make horrible noises like heads diving into disk. Luckily my second drive is O.K. at the moment so as soon as I do a backup I'll transfer onto my second HDD.

[Harrison]

I was just trying to work out how old the oldest HDD is that I still own. For the PC it is a 12GB Quantum Bigfoot from 1998, but some of my Amiga HDD's must be from around 1994/5, making them at least 14 years old.

[Stephen Coates]

The oldest HD I have is the 50MB Quantum drive from my Amiga 500+.

My main boot disk is still my 12GB WD drive which came with the computer in 1999. I am thinking about replacing it though as it is noisy and has had a few issues lately, although it has been fine for the last couple of months.

My 120GB disk (my biggest disk) only has 2GB left on it now. It did a while back have quite a few GB left, but I think most of that must have been used up by me backing up my WD drive just in case.

I am quite tempted to get some SCSI HDs though now I have an ultra wide scsi card in my PC.

On the subject of old HDs, I believe we have one of those very old massive ones in college somewhere, as well as a bigfoot. I will have to ask tommorow and maybe get some photos.

[Harrison]

My bigfoot drive is a 5.25" drive and is huge and very heavy. Still works OK though.

I just thought, my oldest drive is actually from 1993, in an Archos external HD for the A1200/A600. I bought it while my A1200 was still under warranty so I wouldn't void it by opening the case to fit an internal HD.

@Steve. If you are after some old SCSI HDDs then someone on Amibay is offering some for free (price of postage) in the recycle bin area. If you don't currently have access to that section of the site let me know and I will update your account.