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| bpark42:
--- Quote from: Warborg on March 15, 2010, 12:24:21 pm ---It's interesting how a few tainted experiences condemn a whole brand... :) I work on PCs constantly, been building/maintaning/supporting PCs for the better part of 20 years... And I've seen different brands go through their highs and lows. Currently, I've had the best successes with Seagate, using them in multiple systems for years and friends PCs as well without a single failure. Good success with WD, but had a couple of very odd compatibility issues with their 1TB Black Edition drive to the point where I had to pop it in a different system as the one I was installing it on just didn't want to tolerate it... And lastly, Maxtor... I haven't used their drives in a while now, and the main reason for that is when I DID use them, I had almost every single one die prematurely. --- End quote --- Recent Seagate drives had a prevalent and well-documented firmware issue that often resulted in a bricked drive. I recently had two drives die within a week of each other. The first was a Maxtor that died a noisy death, the second was a seagate that just suddenly disappeared from the system to the point where the BIOS would not even detect it. I researched the issue with the Seagate and discovered the firmware bug that can randomly cause the drive to get stuck in a busy state. This bug affected a large number of their recent drives. That's bad enough, but bugs happen....but what has really put me off on Seagate was the fact that they did very little to support the problem they created. They replaced the drives for some people if they were under warranty, but in general would not fix the problem drive itself, at least not for less than $1000 or so. Anyhow, my real point is that any drive can have problems. Pretty much all the brands have had problems recently as they have done everything they can to cut costs and price in a competetive fashion. Space is cheap these days. Buy multiple drives and do regular backups and/or set up RAID 1/5/6 etc. arrays. And on the original topic, a usb 2 drive will be slow compared to sata, but it should be more than sufficient to serve up roms. |
| DashRendar:
Yep, SATA for this purpose is overkill. USB 2.0 should be fine (35 MB/sec). |
| Encryptor:
--- Quote from: bpark42 on March 15, 2010, 03:02:16 pm --- Recent Seagate drives had a prevalent and well-documented firmware issue that often resulted in a bricked drive. I recently had two drives die within a week of each other. The first was a Maxtor that died a noisy death, the second was a seagate that just suddenly disappeared from the system to the point where the BIOS would not even detect it. I researched the issue with the Seagate and discovered the firmware bug that can randomly cause the drive to get stuck in a busy state. This bug affected a large number of their recent drives. That's bad enough, but bugs happen....but what has really put me off on Seagate was the fact that they did very little to support the problem they created. They replaced the drives for some people if they were under warranty, but in general would not fix the problem drive itself, at least not for less than $1000 or so. --- End quote --- Personally I used to like Seagate drives. But I wouldn't buy one now for one reason. Seagate is now owned by Maxtor and my personal opinion is Maxtor drives are JUNK! I've replaced many of them at work. Too many of them for me to have any faith in either of them. Encryptor |
| mwong168:
+1 on the Seagate drives being bad. I build HTPC's for friends and family on the side and last year Seagate was the only drive available in 1.5tb. So I spoke to my friend and he gave me a green light instead of waiting for Western Digital and both drives have failed. The first one crapped out after 5 weeks and was RMA'ed and then shortly after getting the replacement the other drive went in less than 3 months :banghead: I checked and made sure firmware was current but still no good. I had another friend buy a brand new 1tb seagate and again it died so not sure if it can be coincidence that these were the only bad apples? I had two 1.5tb Seagates which ran fine for 3 months in my media server but after I heard these stories from my friends I quickly offloaded them and swapped them equivalent WD 1.5tb and which have now all been replaced with 2tb Hitachi drives. I guess the same can be said about Hitachi and their "deathstar" incident many years ago but that was when IBM owned them but since then I believe things have changed and knock on wood all my 2tb drives are running smoothly without any problems. One thing about the Seagate drives is they made be really paranoid because of how noisy they were compared to the WD and Samsung drives. I ran a thorough scan disk and nothing came up so everything was fine but still didn't want to take a chance and took a $15 hit per drive and sold them on craigslist. Don't even get me started on Maxtor drives :angry: We have a box of around 100+ drives of this particular Maxtor model. Most of them are good but I would only trust using them either for test environments or a RAID setup. We had a client that had Dell Optiflex's in his stores and after a few of them died he decided to be proactive and just use Ghost to image the Maxtor drives to Western Digitals and he was so upset he didn't even want the drives back after we swapped them out. He said burn em' :laugh2: |
| DeLuSioNal29:
Here's what I'd do. I'd buy a bigger IDE drive, then use the imaging software that it comes with (usually on CD - programs like Maxblast) to make an exact copy of your existing drive to the new one. Then use the new drive and keep the older smaller one as a backup. It's very easy to do and has a built in utility to do it with. D |
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