im running out of space on my maxtor 40gig hard drive and im looking for a 160 gb hard drive and i have settled to buy the seagate 160gb sata for £71.xx i read somewhere that these harddrives dont have a bridge (the chip that converts the pata harddrive to sata) is this true?????
Yes it would, but only if it's true. I think some maxtors are native... although I'm not positive. Not that a bridged ATA/133 interface would limit the performance anyways. I dunno US/UK conversions for pricing but I think it's still a good drive.
Yeah, that's pretty cheap for any hard drive that size, especially SATA. And Seagates are nice and quiet too, usually
if its the 7200.8 iirc it will be native sata seagate make the best hdds imo, and they come with a 5 year warranty
Even the 7200.7 are native SATA, Seagate were first to market with them. Even now AFAIK only Maxtors top end 16MB cache HDs are native SATA. There's no huge perf boost but it is nicer. I'd suggest Seagate anyway, 1 year warranty is now industry std, 3 year if you're lucky but Seagate give 5 year on all their consumer HDs!
i didnt know seagate's were that popular and thx for your replys guys im going to get the hard drive tomorrow
Yes all of the seagates are native SATA. I think you're right with the new maxtors... although those also have NCQ so you do actually see a good performance jump. Still you would be unlikely to max any interface out.
You won't be able to take advantage of NCQ on any any chipset other than the 915 and 925X motherboards from Intel, because they are turned off by default. The new chipsets will finally be able to take advantage of NCQ. So if you've been seein' a performance boost, that's purely because of the drive, and Seagate's amazing technology. I love Seagate.
AFAIK NCQ requires both HD and controller support which means both need to be native. I believe only current Seagates and top-end Maxtors are native and only Intel's over-priced under-performing 915/925 chipsets are native with NCQ support. You should get a little boost from a native HD regardless of controller, without native the 'bridge' has to do some converting which must carry a small overhead. However at the mo it seems NCQ isn't as great as it seemed, it can even lead to minor perf hits as well as boosts, much like Intel's HT in that respect I guess. AFAIK Seagate have always been popular, famed for their reliability, quietness and cool operation but these have also hindered them in raw speed tests where they've tended to lag very slightly behind the top HDs. Most people look at speed and price and go only by those 2 criteria. However with a 5 year warranty on offer I think it would be madness to buy anything else ... unless you can be sure of a 3 year warranty and will upgrade before it lapses.
A seagate hard drive will chug along in the back ground, providing stability and low noise, where other makes coughmaxtorcough seem to scream along in the audible sense, provide much worse reliablility, which only offers an unoticable performance increase. I would personally recommend one of these hard drives, as i have been using my 120GB Seagate barry for 6 months and it's the quietest around.
If you think Maxtor are loud don't go near WD! IMHO WD have been trading on the popularity they built up by being the first with 8MB cache, and more recently the 10000rpm Raptor drives. Their HDs are widely deemed the loudest and hottest, but I seriously doubt we're talking remotely important margins here. As for reliability Maxtor are great, in fact the only brands I'd suggest to avoid due to poor reliability are Fujitsu and Hitachi (formerly IBM).
I can't hear my two raptors and I have one of the questest computers around (zalman heatsink is the loudest thing by a good margain)...
I have 2x120gb IBM desktar 180gxp.. and some people will prob laugh at me But infact the 180gxp´s are great, very quiet and cool.. the earlier gxp-series were really ****ty, but the 180gxp-line consists of some really amazing hdd´s that were really low in price when I bought them last summer.. They´ve been running almost nonstop since I bought them (reboot every two weeks or so) and I haven´t had a single problem with them.. but yeah as one guy mentioned above me I´d generally stay away from IBM/Hitachi when it comes to hdd´s with this little exception.. And like (almost) everyone says: after seagate extended their warranty to 5 years you´d be stupid buying something else..
