Recommend me 1Tb HDD - NOT Samsung!

Tuscan

Tuscan

Tuscan

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5 Jan 2003
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Halifax
Got an old PC that runs SATA I hard drives in RAID. Have used it for years, but one of the RAIDed Seagate HDD's gave up the ghost a couple of weeks ago. The investment in a 2nd HDD was therefore very useful in this scenario, allowing me to continue to use the PC with the specialised finance software on it that I need for work.

I bought a pair of 1Tb Samsung HDDs, and could not get them connected at all. Looks like they are firmware downgradable to Sata I 'if' you have a SATA II enabled machine to hand to do that, which I don't. So.....bought a PCI SATA II card, and cloned the old HDD onto one of the Samsungs - only to find that I could not boot up from the Samsung after all that (made PCI card bootable in BIOS - all OK, just could not boot up from the drive).

I did some checking on the net and see that these Samsung drives harbour the issue that they can sometimes be a pig to set up, especially on legacy hardware. Also noted that they seem to have a high failure rate with a lot of drives completley failing in anything from 2 weeks to 6 months. Fairs fair, they are good value drives, they must sell a lot..so inevitably the failure rate may look higher than it should. But given the above problems, I can't be faffing about and don't want to take the risk.

So people...question is...what would you recemmend as a decent pair of 1 Tb hard drives that will have good response speed, be backwards compatible to Sata I 1.5Gps, rubn cool and quiet, and not be stupidly expensive. (don't want much do I? ;-) ). It is the plan that these disks will eventually find their way into a quad core machine in the future, but I don't want a major rebuild project just now.

With thanks

Tus
 
they don't have a higher failure rate, it's just a lot of people own them, because they were so cheap.

you'd see a lot of 'no problems here' posts if such thing existed.

I've got 8x Samsung drives, none have skipped a beat
 
western digital all the way. as you can see from my sig i am rather keen on them. the wd green gp 32mb has excelent speeds for a 5400rpm drive. 110mb at the start and ending at around 50/55mb at the tail end of the disk. thats benchmarked on a totally empty disk btw. you loose 10-20% on a full disk from what i have seen.

there are slightly cheeper options than the wd that could be worth a look too but i ahve no hands on with them
 
Yup, like I said, I am prepared to accept that argument on the basis that people who have had problems with stuff are more likley to shout louder than those without problems.

Still does not help me that I have two 1 Tb paper weights on the desk that just won't work in my current set up. Really need something that can be jumpered down to SATA I with ease, but with all of the Samsungs' benefits if you see what I mean.
 
Thanks for that on the WDs. Had not really considered 5400 rpms disks as I have always used 7200 rpm type for as long as I can remember. Would probably have been more inclined to go for Raptors in the past for their higher still speed, but I hear that they are not so quiet.
 
I will just say that I have 3 samsung 1TB drives, one works perfectly, second works slower and makes strange sounds (because it has newer firmware) but otherwise works well, and third one started showing dead sectors (I received new one today as a replacement).So I am not exactly perfectly happy with Samsung and my next drive would be WD, even if just to change brand once in a while.
 
+1 of the WD Greens.

I've got 2x slightly older WD10EACS 1TB's and 4x WD10EADS 1TB's and they are surprisingly zippy for 5400s and are very cool & quiet.
 
I know the older samsung used to have some pins for jumpers to hard set them to sata1, not sure if the newer ones do? I do have a 1tb F1 but I'm in work at the moment not at home so can't check.

From personal experience I've had nothing but good experiences with Samsung drives. The only time I don't use them, I use Seagate ES series drives for very important data (Seagates enterprise series drives, they are about 33% more expensive but have a much higher mtbf than standard drives).

E-I
 
Thanks to everyone so far.

IIRC their are 4 pins on the back, but no instructions available on how to jumper them for SATA I. The guide that came with the HDDs refers user to a website to download a firmware patch, but that still did not work for me.

I have used Seagates so far, and always found the online support for them to be very good. The drive I am replacing is about 3 years old, and I am undecided whether that is a good or bad service life. The fact is, if one of the two have gone, the other may not be far behind it so time for fresh ones.

I am normally a Samsung fan (for other kit), but their website sounds like it is written by an English speaking Korean, as the grammar etc is pretty poor. I have got an RMA number for them now anyway so looking for a replacement.

The WDs are looking more attractive all the time. I would like to know what the differences are between the models like Caviar Black and RE2, RE3 and RE4.
 
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