Fatman

Apologies - I'm going to have a bit of a rant...
I've just had my second IBM hard drive fail on me. It's an ultra-160 SCSI drive, running in my main desktop PC. I had one fail on me a couple of years ago and it was replaced. Fair enough - these things happen. Unfortunate, but forgivable. Now it's replacement has failed. That's the last IBM hard drive that I buy!

Yes, everything important was backed up but that's not the point. If you value your data, do not buy IBM hard drives.

So - can anyone recommend a decent ultra-160 HDD? I'd like the drive to be as quiet as possible, and it doesn't have to be huge; 18Gb is fine.

RichiW

I had 2 ibm IDE Deskstars go down on me in one year, never buying ibm again

Fatman

My younger brother has had a Deskstar fail on him. These were Ultrastars, which I thought would be more reliable. They're intended for hardcore server use. How can anyone expect them to be used 24*7 in a critical server when I've had two fail in a desktop PC?

swaussie

We ( big German company that sponsers Real Madrid ) run nothing but Seagate drives and although it does happen they dont seem to die very often. Also found them quiter than most so might be a good choice for a desktop. I think they do a line of Cheetah drives that are around 18 gigs.

[Edited by swaussie - 8/25/2003 5:15:11 PM]

Fatman

Yeah... I use IDE Barracudas for 'data' drives in my desktops, and I really like them. For IDEs they're pretty fast, and very quiet as well. Are you referring to IDE or SCSI Barracudas?

Fatman

Yep - they do 10k and 15k rpm drives in the Cheetah range. There's no need for 15k rpm in my desktop PC; I'll go for 10k. You can recommend these?

swaussie

SCSI or at least last time I looked Ultra160 was a SCSI standard

swaussie

yeah can definately recommend them as its what I use in my PC at home as well (ultra320). I find them actually very quite for the performance they give, but are obviously louder than an IDE. It depends if you need quite or performance.

Fatman

I'm used to the noise that the IBM drive made (past tense, awful piece of cr@p... ), which I believe was quite agricultural in comparison. I bet the Seagate SCSI drives are quite a bit quieter. It would be nice if they were as quiet as the Seagate IDE (Barracuda) drives, but I know that's not realistic!

Fatman

Perhaps this is a daft question...? I have an Adaptec 29160 Ultra160 controller. Since most drives are now U320, can I assume that they're all backwards compatible? i.e. that they'll run at U160 speeds on my controller.

You know... I'm very tempted to ditch this SCSI lark. It's a pain in the @ss when drives fail and I'm sorely tempted to go for a couple of RAID-1 IDE Barracudas just for the security of it! Or, perhaps IBM have just tainted my view of SCSI drives...

swaussie

I think they are backwards compatible but why would you spend extra money buying a drive that can move 320MB per second when its running at 160MB per second? It would be like never taking your Scooby out of second gear And yes I think you have had a bad run with the IBM drives because every major datacentre in the world runs SCSI for two reasons: its speed and reliability. It is majorly more expensive for these reasons.

[Edited by swaussie - 8/25/2003 5:47:10 PM]

Fatman

I understand the logic for (firstly) sticking with SCSI and (secondly) advocating the faster standard. I'm just bitter at IBM, that's all!

Fatman

...the other thing is that the new controller would be more expensive than the drive!

snowcrash

ibm's seem to run fine as long as you install some fans for them...

otherwise they toast

ChrisB

You can be plain unluckly with HDs.

I have a server in Telehouse in London. It reported being a 18GB HD down (RAID 1 mirror). Got HP to send out a new one. Day later, the new drive is reporting as being down. Try it in a different hot swap bay, nope.

So the swap out drive gets swapped and it's been fine since. Touch wood!

I've got servers running three year old 9GB IBM SCSI HDs and they've run 24/7 since installation with no hassles at all.

BaldyMan

ibm + tiny bit of heat = bollix

had 3 on a raid - on the main server - all went the same way - bad sectors - crashing - lost info = lots of work for me

Sith

IBM drives (shudder) Know too many people at work with IBM drives that failed. I warned them, but they didn't listen.

Fatman

Unfortunately nobody warned me. Still, at least I can warn people off buying IBM drives now.