HDD help please?!?

Question

i am soon going to be building my own PC, but am stuck trying to get a Hard Drive. it needs to be 160GB and SATA2 but what is the best brand for HDD's?? i have been told that Western Digital are good, and Maxtor.

ok while im here i may as well share with you the rest of the pc spec and see what you all think.
CPU - AMD Athlon 64 AM2 Dual Core 3800
Mobo - Gigabyte AM2 socket
Graphics - nVidia GeForce 7600 GS 512mb
RAM - Geil 1gb DDR2 533 PC4300
DVD - Asus +/- R/RW 16x
Altec Lansing XA2021 speakers 2.1 surround
MS XP Home w/ free Vista upgrade coupon
and a cool looking case

Answer 1

Seagate just bought out maxtor, the warranty for seagate and maxtor is good, WD are not bad. i would go seagate cos i never had problems with them but now i would need to say maxtor as well.

Answer 2

You are asking a completely subjective question really. As long as you buy a hard drive from a reputable company, such as Western Digital, Maxtor, Seagate, or a few others, there's not much to fear. Which one is BEST depends on which one will give you the most storage in the type and speed and physical size that you desire for the BEST price.. and you can froogle.com your way to that with little or no problem. Why 160GB? The standard is a bit higher than that now. If you want to maximize your storage I'd advise getting not the largest drive possible, but as large a drive as possible before the price starts to arc up. Also, what will you use the drive for? If you are a mobile user it may make more sense to buy a medium size drive for internal and then a 250-300 GB external drive for all of your data etc. There's no right answer, only the best deal you can get to suit the need that you have. You didn't really explain what kind of computer you are building or what you plan to use it for, so that leaves a lot open to discussion.

Answer 3

Personal experiance with building systems over the last few years tells me that in short the answeer to your question has to be SEAGATE!
in my experience the life span and performance reliability is almost twice as long as a western digital.
see www.dabs.com for the best price on average within the UK however at this time of year don't expect a quick delivery from any online store. order now and you will expect delivery no earlier than the first week of Jan 07.
Maxtor are worse than Western Digital. Hitachi are a little better than western Digital with Seagate the BEST on the MARKET TODAY. 160GB that is very small these days. if you can afford it i'd recommend getting nothing less than 500GB especially if you want to be able to use your system for storing large amounts of data such as movie file and high quality uncompressed music files. Rembering that a 160GB drive will give you only around 150GB or less of usable space once formatted. for 160GB usable space consider nothing less than a 200GB.
as for the geforce GPU forget it! unless you are only going to be gaming on your computer. if you want or need to output to a PAL TV system (you will if in the UK) then avoid the geforce as they have a nasty habit of only outputting to a black and white picture. in my experinace ati radeon seeem to be a great GPU the x1600 and up with 500MB ram are excellent. and remeber to get a quality display panel such as the Benq FP91G+ (available from dabs for under £150. i had a 17" acer and that appeared to be fine. but getting the Benq WOW it showed how bad the acer was. so go try a few monitors at a local store. get the store to connect different monitors to the same computer so you can get an accurate comparison of the different brands and models. when you find one you are happy with buy it or go home and browse on www.froogle.com for the cheapest price.
and remeber what others have said MAXTOR and Western Digital drives are the worst on performance (if you want a drive that can handle being up constantly or shut down a couple of times a day). also remeber that regardless of brand each drive has a maximum nuber of start stop cycles it can tolerate. so to avoid premature failure in your systems power saving settings be sure to disable the drives ability to be turned off when idle, (leave the drive spining all the time the computer is running this provides (in my experiance) the longest life span for a hard drive.

Answer 4

Hi Ya, Used to work for ICL (International Computers) Worldwide Repairs. Saw an even amount of each manufacturers drives coming through for repair. If you can imagine a car on a production line, no two are the same, as with all high volume production you will experience some users that say their product has given good service and some the opposite. Pick your drive based on what your own requirements are, what will work or fit and what is best value. How long it lasts is what you need to ask a clairvoyant.

Answer 5

I personally trust only Seagate & Western Digital. They are the two pioneers in hard disk engineering and remain the leaders in performance & technology.

http://www.seagate.com/products/retail/...

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/product...

Avoid Maxtor & Quantum. Although generally reliable they have the highest failure rates among the top manufacturers.

regards,
Philip T

Answer 6

Maxtor sucks!

I'd say choose Western Digital or Seagate.

Answer 7

I gotta disagree here! Been building systems for a long time and use to use WD and Seagate! I swore by WD but they got sloppy and I had some new drives go sour quickly! Went to maxtor and have far fewer hard drive problems!

Answer 8

I would personally go for either Seagate or Western Digital as they have the best quality drives AND the best support with a turnaround of only 2 days if your drives do happen to be faulty.

Answer 9

Maxtor > Western Digital

They have a faster sata or ide transfer than WD

Answer 10

i agree with the guy about Maxtors adn i too also have been building top of the line computers for years and iv tried many diff brands but i have had no problems with maxtors and they r pretty reasonable priced