I'm looking for new harddrives. This is my experience so far. SATA cables: ============= I have zero good experiences with any SATA cables. They've all been crap so far. 3.5" ATA harddrives buyable where I live: ========================================== (All drives are 7200rpm, for some reason.) Hitachi "DeskStar" 500 GB / 16 MB / 8.5 ms / SATA or PATA Maxtor "DiamondMax 11" 500 GB / 16 MB / 8.5 ms / SATA or PATA Maxtor "MaXLine Pro" 500 GB / 16 MB / 8.5 ms / SATA or PATA Seagate "Barracuda 7200.10" 500 GB / 16 MB / ? / SATA or PATA Seagate "Barracuda 7200.10" 750 GB / 16 MB / ? / SATA or PATA Seagate "Barracuda 7200.9" 500 GB / 16 MB / 11 ms / SATA or PATA Seagate "Barracuda 7200.9" 500 GB / 8 MB / 11 ms / SATA or PATA Seagate "Barracuda ES" 500 GB / 16 MB / 8.5 ms / SATA Seagate "Barracuda ES" 750 GB / 16 MB / 8.5 ms / SATA Seagate "ESATA" 500 GB / 16 MB / ? / SATA (external) Seagate "NL35.2 ST3500641NS" 500 GB / 16 MB / 8 ms / ? / SATA Seagate "NL35.2 ST3500841NS" 500 GB / 8 MB / 8 ms / ? / SATA Western Digital "SE16 WD5000KS" 500 GB / 16 MB / 8.9 ms / SATA Western Digital "RE2 WD5000YS" 500 GB / 16 MB / 8.7 ms / SATA I've tried Maxtor and IBM (now Hitachi) harddrives. Both makes have failed on me, but most of the time due to horrible packaging. I don't care a split-second whether one kind is marginally faster than the other, so all the reviews on AnandTech etc. are utterly useless to me. There's an infinite number of more effective ways to get better performance than to buy a slightly faster harddrive. I DO care about quality, namely: * How often the drives has catastrophic failure, * How they handle heat (dissipation & acceptance - how hot before it fails?), * How big the spare area is, * How often they have single-sector failures, * How long the manufacturer warranty lasts, * How easy the manufacturer is to work with wrt. warranty. I haven't been able to figure the spare area size, heat properties, etc. for any drives. Thus my only criteria so far has been manufacturer warranty: How much bitching do I get when I tell them my drive doesn't work. My main experience is with Maxtor. Maxtor has been none less than superb wrt. warranty! Download an ISO with a diag tool, burn the CD, boot the CD, type in the fault code it prints on Maxtor's site, and a day or two later you've got a new drive in the mail and packaging to ship the old one back in. If something odd happens, call them up and they're extremely helpful. Unfortunately, I lack thorough experience with the other brands. Questions: =========== A.) Does anyone have experience with returning Hitachi, Seagate or WD drives to the manufacturer? Do they have manufacturer warranty at all? How much/little trouble did you have with Hitachi, Seagate or WD? B.) Can anyone *prove* (to a reasonable degree) that drives from manufacturer H, M, S or WD is of better quality? Has anyone seen a review that heat/shock/stress test drives? C.) Does good SATA cables exist? Eg. cables that lock on to the drives, or backplanes which lock the entire disk in place? Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for answers (if any) :-). - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
