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View Full Version : Which hard disk to buy for new Quad?


AndyX-
2005-11-21, 10:11
Hi,

Does anyone know what would be the best internal hard disk to buy for my shiny new Quad? :)

I'd like something between 400 - 500 Gig (it came with a Maxtor 6L250M0 250gig).

Also, what would be the best way of cloning the old disk? Can I use Backup to do this or do I need something more advanced?

Thanks for your help,

Andy

Luca
2005-11-21, 11:24
I'd suggest a Seagate. They have the best warranty (five years). And I would recommend against another Maxtor. They're the cheapest and I think they fail a little more often. At the very least, they're the loudest.

It's impossible to determine the relative reliability of a particular make of hard drives using only personal or secondhand experiences. I've heard of drives failing prematurely from ALL the major drive companies. But take a look at this... I did a Google search for "______ sucks" (fill in the blank with the drive manufacturer), and here are the results:

Seagate sucks: 451
Western Digital sucks: 496
Hitachi sucks: 650
Maxtor sucks: 1,790

Amazingly, Maxtor actually got more hits than even "IBM sucks," which came in at 1,610. And those links are referring to ANY IBM product that the person doesn't like, from Thinkpads to Netvistas to their customer service or their website. IBM's hard drive division became infamous for the 75GXP, which had a stupidly high failure rate. Hitachi bought them and their hard drives have been pretty much reliable since the 75GXP debacle.

So, go to NewEgg and pull up a Seagate SATA hard drive.

beardedmacuser
2005-11-21, 12:15
Also, what would be the best way of cloning the old disk? Can I use Backup to do this or do I need something more advanced?

In 10.4, Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility) can "Restore" a source drive to a destination drive (i.e. to your new drive).

AndyX-
2005-11-22, 09:39
Thanks Luca. Looking at the Seagate drives, the main difference I can see between the 400 and 500 (apart from the obvious!) is the cache. 8mb on the 400 and 16mb on the 500. Will this make much of a difference in speed and would it be worth the $140 more?

Thanks Beardedmacuser - I'll try that. I've only ever used disk utility for repairing permissions!

intlplby
2005-11-22, 10:25
16mb makes a different if you are going tobe using larger files

what size are most of your files

Luca
2005-11-22, 12:25
$140 for 100 GB is a bad deal. $1.40/GB isn't good at all. Look at your typical 80 GB hard drive - it costs $50, which is $0.63/GB.

Going from 8 MB cache to 16 MB might actually make a difference in performance. I know I saw a difference when moving from a 2 MB to an 8 MB hard drive a while back, despite both being made by the same company and both having the same RPMs and capacity. But $140 for double the cache and 100 GB more space isn't worth it. I mean, for that price you could buy an external case and a 200-250 GB hard drive to put in it.

AndyX-
2005-11-23, 19:18
Thanks for the info guys. I've ordered a Seagate 400 gig and with the money I've "saved" I've ordered another 2gig of Ram!