Reliable and fast 500GB drives

Boycie · 17 Jan 2007 at 12:27

Well after much deliberation I've finally decided to purchase a couple of 500GB SATA babys today for a server that is always on and highly used (it's a domain controller). I've narrowed it down to, well... all the 500GB SATA drives on OcUK :confused:

It's been a while since I've bought hard drives for a server so just one or two things I'd like to be sure about beforehand...

Buying either Hitachi or Maxtor are both going to be a good 40 quid more expensive than the other three makes but the only real difference I can see is seek time (8.5ms as opposed to 8.9ms), is this really such a big difference?

Would you advise me to go for/avoid any particular makes when it comes to reliability? Sure I keep backups but I'm hoping I won't have to use them!

Cheers,
Luke

rpstewart · 17 Jan 2007 at 12:51

I'd avoid the Maxtor certainly, there are far too many reports of failures at the moment for my liking.

Personally I'd be going for a Seagate 7200.10, I picked up a couple the other week and I'm impressed with the speed. For a server though the 5 year warranty they have is probably more important.

The Hitachi will be fine but the design is getting a bit long in the tooth, the new 7K1000s should be very good but there's no indication of availability.

WD have a RE version of their drives which is meant to be optimised for 24x7 operation but I've no recent experience of their products. Samsung are similar, I've not used one of their desktop drives so I can't really comment. The general opinion though is that they are very quiet.

rpstewart · 17 Jan 2007 at 13:28

I'd skip on the 7200.9 and look at the 7200.10s although you'll need to step up to at least 200Gb to get one. They're 16Mb cache and 5 year warranty too but they have perpendicular recording on the platters which has increased the data density over the competition to the point that they're the fastest 7200rpm drives available (at least until the Hitachi 7K1000s appear).

Boycie · 17 Jan 2007 at 13:36

rpstewart said:
WD have a RE version of their drives which is meant to be optimised for 24x7 operation but I've no recent experience of their products.

Didn't see that one, they look just the ticket - 1.2 million hours is nearly 137 years, I think that might just be long enough...

thanks!