Recommend me a good internal SATA 500GB to 1TB Hard Drive

[TheoGB]

As the above question.

My attempts to fix the sudden extended read hangs on my existing 500GB Seagate Barracuda SATA2 32MB ST3500320AS 7200RPM with the recommended BIOS update on the HDD have failed so I guess I need to get a new one. Then I can send that one back as faulty as it's only 16 months old.

Motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R Socket 775 Motherboard

Thanks in advance.

[dysfunction]

How about this:
Samsung F1

or this: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/150256 - Hitachi DeskStar 1TB

[ian turner]

Not seagate barracudas.
Well not until they've had sufficient time to prove they are not going to do a nother firmware update kills your drive job on their users.
Not Maxtor as they are seagate.
My standard comment is it's hit and miss with harddrives and don't take any recommendations from anyone who isn't basing their advice on having handled hundreds of drives at work (excluding hard drive manufacturer employees). 10 drives over a long period is not an extensive survey and someone will pop up claiming they've never had any problems with seagate
Deskstars are currently the cheapest.
Samsungs are popular with people with oversensitive hearing.
Western digitals well maybe the green series but then no one is overly enthusiastic about their drives but this may mean nothing.
Check out those drives and you will find complaints in the customer reviews about failures.

[internetuser]

Western Digital green ones are canny

[TheoGB]

Okay cheers for the recommendations.

I see people have stopped calling Deskstars 'deathstars' now. My first was the 30GB one back in 2000/2001 when that was one of the biggest internal drives you could get and it lasted years.

I'll have a look at the Samsungs and the WD Greens, then.

[ian turner]

People who talk about deathstars are old and have trouble remembering what happened yesterday

[mbuckhurst]

Originally Posted by ian turner

Not seagate barracudas.
Well not until they've had sufficient time to prove they are not going to do a nother firmware update kills your drive job on their users.
Not Maxtor as they are seagate.
My standard comment is it's hit and miss with harddrives and don't take any recommendations from anyone who isn't basing their advice on having handled hundreds of drives at work (excluding hard drive manufacturer employees). 10 drives over a long period is not an extensive survey and someone will pop up claiming they've never had any problems with seagate
Deskstars are currently the cheapest.
Samsungs are popular with people with oversensitive hearing.
Western digitals well maybe the green series but then no one is overly enthusiastic about their drives but this may mean nothing.
Check out those drives and you will find complaints in the customer reviews about failures.

Nothing wrong with Seagate's - I've got loads of the latest series, plus a fair few older.

I'm not sure why anyone would worry about a firmware updates, in my 20 years of working in IT and the 1000s of drives I've had any responsibility for, I've not yet once done a firmware update to any drive.

So long as the drive has been around a few months, all major issues should be solved before you buy it.

mike

[ian turner]

Failure to patch the firmware meant an unacceptably high chance of drive failure
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01...ailure_plague/
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/200...ks_barracudas/
And http://www.channelregister.co.uk/200..._blasted_away/
Obviously not blasted away enough given the release of a patch that increased the failure rate from unacceptably high to 100%.
Wouldn't touch them with a barge pole until they have had enough time to get their act together.

[TheoGB]

As I say, I have the firmware update. I burned the disc and it doesn't work. As such I'm really not looking to trust Seagate again. Even if another drive has an issue I would hope their support and patching facility is better.

[ian turner]

By the time you were getting read failures it was too late to patch.
Will you be claiming on warranty given that it's at least a 3 year or possibly 5 year warranty ?

[TheoGB]

Originally Posted by ian turner

By the time you were getting read failures it was too late to patch.
Will you be claiming on warranty given that it's at least a 3 year or possibly 5 year warranty ?

I'm not getting read errors or rather I'm not getting an error on screen. The drive is failing to run in SMART mode, as I think you pointed out here:
http://www.thedvdforums.com/forums/s...d.php?t=550185

The data does not seem to be affected, it just has these enormous pauses where you can't do anything. I assumed the firmware thing would correct that but you're saying you can't do anything?

Yeah, my plan is to get a new HDD and then send it back for sure to get a new drive or cash or whatever.

[ian turner]

Hmm naaah was suggesting you check the smart error counts. Its disk health monitoring not a mode of operation.
Does the patch claim it can't find the drive ?
A number of threads with comments about this with speculation that it's due to the Sata chipset on the motherboard though nothing definite. Suggest you see if you can find anything indicating a solution though in the meantime backup everything, install a new drive and demand a replacement.

[TheoGB]

Okay, I'll go into it a bit more.

I got the pauses mentioned and you suggested SMART might be responsible. I therefore turned that off in the BIOS which helped the problem immensely.

However, I have no idea how you check the smart error counts. Is this in the Administrative Tools somewhere?

I've also never heard of health monitoring as an operation.


Anyway: I check with Seagate and they confirm that my Firmware should be updated and provide a link to an ISO to burn into a boot disc. This resulted in a disc that gives me a DOS menu with A,B,C depending on which disc I'm running plus a Seagate Detect thing.

If I run the Seagate Detect thing it says it's checking SATA items a few times then gives me a hex error; if I run 'A' (the one for my drive) I just get a hang.

Back up is pretty much in hand. I'll do another bit tonight but anything new on there isn't really a problem so if I were to get home and find it in a state of death then c'est la vie.

I'd love to solve this. Presumably because of this my Vista also takes AN AGE to start up. I have 4GB of RAM and I'm running x64 fer cryin' out loud!

Cheers for the advice. Feel free to point me to some links rather than writing out loads yourself, I'd just not had much luck finding anything very concrete on line.

(There certainly IS and issue with getting the E-SATA connection to work on my motherboard but this is apparently frequently not a great thing. I need to check my BIOS on the motherboard but I have to find some tiny text on the board somewhere to do this and haven't really been bothered to look inside right now.)

[ian turner]

something like this and turn smart back on in the bios.
What is your motherboard btw ?

[TheoGB]

Originally Posted by ian turner

something like this and turn smart back on in the bios.
What is your motherboard btw ?

Okay, cheers, I didn't realise what SMART was. I'll download that and install.

Motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R Socket 775 Motherboard.

[driver8]

Drives rated 5/5

Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 (750GB) Hitachi £90
Samsung EcoGreen (500GB) Samsung £37
Samsung SpinPoint F1 (640GB) Samsung £46
Samsung SpinPoint F1 (750GB) Samsung £56 Labs Winner
Samsung SpinPoint F1 (1TB) Samsung £69 5
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (640GB) Seagate £61
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (1TB) Seagate £75 5
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (1.5TB) Seagate £98 Recommended
Western Digital Caviar Green (1TB) Western Digital £69 Recommended
Western Digital Caviar Green (2TB) Western Digital £208
Western Digital VelociRaptor (300GB) Western Digital £191 Recommended

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/labs/176/hard.../products.html

[ian turner]

Last time I bought a disk drive on the basis of PCPRO recommendations it garnered the name of the deathstar
Plus if you check the dates on that you''ll find that those reviews are a year old as they don't do drive lab tests that frequently

[TheoGB]

Originally Posted by driver8

Western Digital Caviar Green (1TB) Western Digital £69 Recommended

69, DUDE! Hurr hurr hurr.

(Sorry.)

[Just Passing]

I purchased 2 Hitachi 1Tb drives last week. One failed yesterday

[ian turner]

See here and sort by most recent first and see 3 or 4 similar it went bang reports. Not that that should deter one from buying a samsung but drive failures are all part of the fun of buying hard drives whatever the model or make