We normally don't compare between companies, but between their products. Samsung's F3 is good, Seagate's Momentus XT is better if you have the money, and WD also has some good stuff. It depends more on your budget and what type of hard disk you want.

That's why, as a person not bitten by the Seagate firmware fiasco, I'm going to say to ignore that specific advice and buy what you think is the best for you. Seagate currently has no firmware problem.

One idea to consider is to later replace the USB 2.0 casing with a USB 3.0 casing. It will cost you and likely also your warranty, but that will unlock your hard drive's performance.

But media storage drives really don't require much performance at all as even the slow USB 2.0 data transfer is more than sufficient for Full HD playback. On the other hand, those with fast access times might be more pleasant if you have hundreds or thousands of files in a single folder. It will be most noticeable with SSDs, except that SSDs are luxury items for mere storage and have crappy capacities.

This post has been edited by everling: Jul 4 2010, 08:49 AM

I'd rather avoid anything with blue LEDs. They can light up your room at night.

Because I like it dark. Are you afraid of the dark?

For the curious, SATA 1.5 Gbps is 150 MByte/s. Very few hard disks can hit beyond that and most still averages below 100 MByte/s.

Maybe not even the same hard disk. If you kept track of the serial number, you can tell if they give you another hard disk as a replacement or fixed your hard disk. The last time I RMAed a hard disk, the serial number of the returned drive was different.

Don't know about the particular news you read, but it is very possible. Undeleting files is easy, limited only by luck or if the file was securely deleted.

How do you know they do this? Publicised company policy, news, or working there?

This post has been edited by everling: Jul 17 2010, 06:02 PM

Statistics does allow you to sell a thousand HDDs that lasts for five years each even if the average failure rate of that model in six months is 99%.

Ouch.

Perhaps there might be an outside influence like an underpowered or ageing PSU? They can damage your HDD when the HDD loses power at critical moments.

Maybe a faulty cable then?

I have two Caviar Greens myself, but the older WD10EADS models. No problems after I RMAed one of them for a possible PSU related failure.

Ugh... all these scary talk about Greens failing is making me itch to get a new HDD. >_<

Because SSDs are a lot harder to make than HDDs and the next generation of SSD technology isn't quite in place yet. As for 'insider' information, it's well known that Intel is working on releasing it's 3rd gen stuff in the second half of the year. When Intel released their 2nd gen stuff, prices dropped 60%, so hopefully something similar will happen for the 3rd gen.

A good SSD will still crush a RAID 4x 1TB array in raw performance like boot speeds. The best way to utilise SSDs is to buy only one for your OS, applications and games partition. Use cheaper huge capacity HDDs for your data storage like audio, video and pictures.



FidelisGVR, for multiple files, HDD performance usually suffers greatly, because their access times are very slow.

Is the Samsung F3 1TB HD103SJ still the best overall 1TB HDD? Or is there a newer model?

Thanks for your quick reply.

That's very unusual and might be indicative of more serious problems. The only "aging" sign should be heavy disk fragmentation. But even at its worst shouldn't exhibit this level of a performance problem.

It may be a sign. Better do a backup of your most important stuff now. And if you have only one HDD, it may well be time to think about buying a new one.

For reliability AND speed, you just can't go wrong with SSDs.

For anything else, you'll need at least two HDDs.

Somebody high above you has given you another opportunity to retrieve your data. Take it!

Maybe it's 'alive' for now because it was from a cold boot. Once the drive warms up, the problems might come back again. This behaviour is what I used to retrieve what I could from one of my HDDs before having to RMA it.

What I'm wondering is, can AMD mobos support Intel's EFI?

The BIOS is not the OS. The OS sits on top of the BIOS. They're working on replacing the old BIOS standard with another standard, EFI, that can handle 64-bit addresses; which should last at least a thousand years of capacity improvements.

It is strange that XP would only recognise 990MB out of a 3TB drive when it could handle 2TB HDDs.

It's not the OS problem. It's a hardware problem on the motherboard.

Your recommendation is what the manufacturers have been doing for the last few years, since EFI has been introduced in 2007. They say millions of machines now ship with EFI. At the least, I think all of Apple's hardware that runs on Intel processors uses EFI MBs.

Btw, I got my answer regarding AMD. Seems like they're a founding member of the board that currently administrates the UEFI. Nice and neat on that point.