Bother, it's all terribly complex

[pyoor_excuse]

So, back when I followed computers and IT I knew which hard drive manufacturer was good, and which sucked. I had favourites, and brands I'd not touch. I was a consumate geek and cared not if the drive produced more or less decibels of noise, so long as it was quick, and had a low seek time.

Now I look at the drive comparison chart trying to balance 42dB/A against 35.9dB/A and power dissipation and usage figures against seek times and transfer rates, and find myself wanting to hide. Part of me wants the fastest drive I can lay my hands on (because eventually it'll find it's way into the work mac, I expect, when it gets too small for entertainment mac usage), and then I'll want it to be quick, and less concerned about noise. But while it's sat next to the TV I want it to be quiet and consume little power. Damn it, why's it so complex.

Comments

[jordax.livejournal.com]

Seagate Barracuda. Mostly quick and quiet. If you want more quick, Seagate did make a tool that could disable the acoustic damping controls, producing faster seek times. Though most modern 7200rpm drives will be quick enough for everyday purposes. The numbers are largely irrelevant.

Big cache is nice for speed and seems to help with multitasking.

I have a fleet of Barracuda's; been running some of them for several years now. The first one developed a few bad sectors, remapped them itself and has been happily running since. The other drives have been fine.

All the SATA 350 drives I have are vastly faster than the PATA drives. If you aren't on SATA, I'd really encourage you to think about it at your next big upgrade.

Every manufacturer has had some disaster stories. Every manufacturer has people who swear by or swear at their drives. Really it's all just luck. That said, we've had a few Western Digital drives at work develop problems and I see no reason to keep using them. Our single Maxtor drive also died.

[pyoor_excuse]

See, the problem with that is that there appear to be two options for the Seagate. One of them is dog-slow (on writes, fine on reads, but that could potentially be a problem if it were used on the WorkMac) but is the quietest drive by *miles*. The other of them is the loudest drive in the test I've been nosing at. But more annoying than that is the power consumption. They both use much more power than the other drives, and since this machine gets left on a lot (unlike all the other machines in the house), that's a bit of a bugger. I know it's only a few watts extra, but...

[jordax.livejournal.com]

You've looked at the stats far more than me. :) I've no idea which particular drives I have, but I've been impressed with how quiet they all are (shame about the PSU fans now...).

If you're really serious about saving power, set the computer to spin down the drives when they aren't in use. There's going to be large parts of the day where you don't need the drives at all.

[pyoor_excuse]

Well, it's only left on when it's doing stuff, which in general requires disk access :)

It's off the rest of the time...