On Wed, 01 Nov 2000 19:24:02 -0500, Romanator wrote: >What would be the most preferable hard drive to install in your computer >or does it matter? I've been building PC's for clients for 13 years now - and the past few years I've used IBM drives in both workstations (IDE - DeskStar) and in servers (SCSI - UltraStar). To date, I've had one drive crash out of MANY. To compare that, a large client switched to Dell, which uses a mix. Quite a few have the HDD crash when the PC is around a month old, and of those that crash all were WestenDigital (WesternCrapital in my mind) Before IBM I was using Fujitsu - it took so long for new drive models to get here from Japan that at times they would get here and ship them back as they could not sell them in the USA for the price they wanted to get for them. As well, tech support was hard to contact in those days. I heard that it changed after I quit using them. As well, a few years with Quantum. They actually had to buy some drives back once as they did not have enough media to repair the drive. Quite a few times it seemed they were pusing the technology envelope too hard, and new ideas were flops at my expense. Maxtor as much as I have used them were good middle of the road drives - not had to contact tech support so I don't know how they are. Seagate - I used them for Cheetah's before IBM got their 10K RPM drives out, not bad but noisier than IBM. And when you sit next to a server w/ RAID 5 it makes a difference. I hated the high pitch screem. That server is now sold and history! So, the order IBM Maxtor Seagate Quantum Fujitsu None! WD (WC) <g> Some of your other issues might be related to other compents of your hardware - motherboard, BIOS, IDE chip, etc... I had a couple of BCM/GVC motherboards - 440BX chip set, they were a pain about drives over 8GB. I had an IWill 440BX board, it using Mandrake 7.0 could only see 8GB of a 9GB drive. Currently I have a SuperMicro board - a rare 820 chip with DIMM and the famous MTH chip. Knock on wood it has been very solid with a 20GB ATA66 IBM DeskStar - and dual boots using Power Boot between Win2K and Mandrake 7.1. The only trick was to partition with Linux, and set the Extended partition to type F so that Win2K could install FAT32 out to the end of the drive. I use FAT32 as I developed my own imaging technology using InfoZip and some other tools. Someday I will tackle NTFS imaging. All the best! (And that means hardware too) To heck with the over clocking folks who do strange things with strange hardware. I stick to the middle of the road with cool hardware - and have just enough problems to keep life interesting. <g> Michael Lueck Lueck Data Systems http://www.lueckdatasystems.com/
