I'm looking to buy a new 80GB hard drive. I've seen a few similarly priced drives which take my fancy. Which one do you think is best? Seagate ST380011A Barracuda http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/prod...2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=36369 Hitachi 7K80 Deskstar http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/prod...2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=79446 Maxtor 6Y080L0 Diamond Plus 9 http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/prod...2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=40968
Personaly, out of the three, I would go for Seagate. Reason being is that all the hard drives I see at work are either WD or Seagate. Therefore my assumption is that they must be doing something right.... Also picking up from different posts in different forums.
Go with Seagate, they're generally concidered some of the most reliable drives out there. Maxtor has had a lot of bad rap in the past so while I'm sure they make plenty of good drives you can do better. I've owned a Hitachi and I no longer like it as it's been giving me some pretty annoying problems now for a while.
I've noticed that the Maxtor is ATA-133 compliant, whereas the Seagate and Hitachi are ATA-100 compliant. How much of a performance increase does this give the Maxtor?
Pretty much none, the difference between the two is very minor. It's possible there will be a difference but I doubt you'll notice it. While yes I'd be more inclined to suggest a SATA 150 Harddrive you do what you can afford
Okay thanks for the advice guys. :good: I've evaluated my options and I'm going to stay loyal to Maxtor and buy the Diamond Plus 9. The Seagate may be a better drive, but I always prefer to buy from a company i've had a good experience with in the past.
If you haven't bought the Maxtor yet, I've had enough bad experience with Maxtor for the both of us, losing about 500GB of data in total. Seagate on the other hand uses the same liquid bearing technology they use in their pricey SCSI line in their inexpensive IDE/SATA HDDs. That's why they have a much longer warranty than other similar HDDs on the market. I say go with Seagate if it's still an option.
