Re: persistent storage hardware: recommendations, comments, and opinions please
On Monday 21 January 2002 22:26, briand@zipcon.net wrote:
> >>>>> "dman" == dman <dsh8290@rit.edu> writes:
>
> dman> First my current setup:
> dman> 10GB Maxtor IDE disk
> dman> Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> dman> 5.6G 5.1G 271M 96% /
> dman> 4.0G 2.5G 1.3G 64% /home
> dman> 125M 40k 124M 1% /tmp (tmpfs, not on-disk)
>
> dman> I want to buy another disk to augment this. There's not enough
> room dman> on this one for my music _and_ an OS (and working files --
> homework, dman> etc).
<rest snipped>
I would with briand's comments. IDE drives should be plenty fast enough for
most desktop/home use systems, and even for a small server (eg something for
a home LAN and/or small office setup) and will save you plenty of $ over a
SCSI setup.
In terms of specific drives:
I am presently running an IBM Deskstart XGP 45MB (7200 rpm/ATA-100) and a WD
Caviar 40GB 7200 rpm ATA-100 in my main machine. I got the IBM for about $140
online (mwave.com) and have had no problems with it, but would probably not
recommend it as a first choice right now due to the presence of drives of
this model that can suddenly trash all your data (a lot of postings on line
about this a few months ago). Mine works fine, but maybe I've been lucky so
far. The WD (which houses my /home partition) has also been without problems,
and both drives installed without any special effort under Linux. Actually, I
never got around to switching them to ata-100, so they both have been running
ata-66. Speed is excellent even without ata-100.
Other drivers to consider are the WD Caviar 80GB 7200/ata-100, which seems to
go through various specials from time to time - last week it was at OfficeMax
for $199 with an $80 rebate. Sadly, I didn't get there until the end of the
week and all were sold out.
Another drive, which I considering for my house server (which I am just
building) is the Maxtor Diamondmax series, which seems to be well liked at
places like tomshardware.com.
My best recommendation is to stick with a brand like the Maxtor Diamondmax or
WD Caviar, and watch the flyers in the weekend papers from CompUSA, Best Buy,
Office Max, Staples, etc. You are bound to find a drive with a significant
discount or rebate if you can afford to wait a few weeks for one to come up.
N
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