Best bullet-proof drive?

Curio · 3 Feb 2006 at 21:34

Looking for a 200GB ATA100 drive for an old 1.2GHz Duron machine that I'm turning into a media/network backup. I'm looking for something very reliable (rather than just fast) as the missus will be using it to backup her Photoshop work onto. At the moment I have a Western Digital Caviar SE 200GB ear-marked, as it's actually the cheapest 200GB at my supplier. But I'm willing to spend a bit more if there's a more robust drive. Any recommendations?

Cheers

Curio · 4 Feb 2006 at 00:35

Hmm, Seagate are usually my first choice but I'd heard good things about the WD Caviars and the price was nice. Think I'll take another look at the Seagates tho.

A Raptor wouldn't make sense for what I'll be using it for - I want something big and good value thanks

They're also a bit too noisy and I want this machine to be as quiet as possible.

Thanks for all the suggestions anyway. Out of interest, any brands I should stay clear of in terms of reliability?

EDIT: It's got to be ATA100 as that's all the KT7A mobo supports and I want to keep it simple

Curio · 10 Feb 2006 at 03:43

Thanks for the replies guys.

Basically, RAID is definitely something I'll be doing at a later date. When she has graduated I'm hoping to build her a nice work station with a proper storage solution. Until then I'm just looking for something bog-standard, cheap and reliable. She does backup onto DVD/CD as well (when I bug her enough about it

) so I'm not too worried about losing anything.

I'm starting to lean towards the Seagates now.....which was my initial gut feeling

Curio · 13 Feb 2006 at 03:40

darreny said:
personally i just use an external HDD with true image, the chances of both my drives going at once are slim

Yeah, an external would be good, but seeing as I wanted to get this old machine running as a bit of a media centre as well, I thought it would be much easier/cheaper to just whack a drive in that and hook it up to the network.