What is the second-best 40GB 7200?

[Tea]

Mostly I like the Western Digital WD400BB, and we sell a fair number of them. Just going on gut feel, they seem a fraction faster than the Samsung 40GB 7200s that we often stock, though I often wonder if that is my imagination. But 40GB 7200s are in mild short supply right now and we have been struggling to get Western Digitals or Samsungs.

So, faced with a choice of Seagate Barracuda ATAs or Maxtor 740s, which way should I go? I care more about reliability than performance, though fast is nice too. Pricing (from memory) in Oz dollars:

Samsung: $158
Western Digital: $167
Seagate: about $160 or $170
Maxtor: $180

(We get good volume discounts on WD and Samsung, less on Seagate (different supplier that we don't buy as much from), none at all on Maxtor (different supplier again), so other people may well have quite different prices.)

(Oh. I forgot to mention IBM. We don't have an IBM supplier at present. Haven't troubled to look for one either, I confess.)

 

[CougTek]

Maxtor are quite reliable in my experience and the D740X should be even more because it was developped by Quantum (my personal favorite for ATA drives). The Seagate should be fine too. But the foam layer next to the PCB makes it heat more than most other 7.2Krpm ATA drives. Heat is a concern because the lifespan of a component is generally relative to the amount of heat it had to sustain.

I saw no numbers about the failure rate of both these drives, but my reasonning concludes that the D740X should be more reliable than the Barracuda ATA IV. Both are better than any of the recent IBM drives though.

 

[Mercutio]

From my experience, I'd say Maxtor makes the best 40GB 7200rpm. The 740X is a marvelous drive.
I'd say the WD400BB is second, followed by the older Quantum AS and/or Maxtor DM40+, both of which are still being sold.

I've never used Samsung's drives at all, and Seagate for IDE is verboten. IBM's 60GXP is, well, we all know about that one.

Can you get Maxtor drives at all? In all the time I've seen you post, I've never seen mention of you offering a Maxtor drive for sale. Even your history of hard disks doesn't touch on them (much).

 

[NRG = mc²]

Another vote for the D740. Just picked up a second one today. I had an 80Gb and now I replaced my whining Fireball LM with a 40G D740. In typical Quantum style it has a bit of a whine to it, but certainly less than any other Quantum drive I've had. Still got that cool turbine spindown noise, and best of all its made in Japan. 'Nuff said. Those three words give me confidence.

I too hate the metal with foam shield Seagate puts on the bottom of their drives. I'm sure it does help reduce the risk of touching/damaging the circuitboard but that foam makes stuff toasty in there. I used to have a Medallist 4321 and I remember how hot it used to get underneath. Perhaps thats why it died with a nice smell.

 

[Tannin]

Hmmm .... I was afraid people would say the Maxtor was the best. Knowing you guys, it will be the pick of them too.

Wish the price was more reasonable. When you get right down to it, you can only get so many dollars for any particular system. Yes, it's fairly easy to squeeze a few extra dollars out of someone for some things - DDR instead of SDRAM, for example, or a 7200 RPM drive instead of a 5400. But, on the whole, the price people are willing to pay for a system of any given spec tends to be more-or-less fixed.

If I was to conduct an imaginary interview with an imaginary customer, it would go like this:

Customer: "I want to buy this system you advertised for $1650."

Me: "Will you pay $40 extra for a 7200 RPM hard drive? It is noticeably faster."

Customer: "Yes. No problem."

Me: "OK, that's $1690. A DDR board is faster than that SDRAM board you are considering. What about an extra $100 for a better main board and some DDR RAM?"

Customer: "OK. Let's do it."

Me: "No worries, we are up to $1790. What about stepping up to a better brand of hard drive?"

Customer: "Good. What do you recommend?"

Me: "The Maxtor 740X."

Customer: "Fine. I'll have that one."

Me: "740X it is. That will be $1810."

Cuistomer: "You said $1790."

Me: "That's with the Seagate drive. The Maxtor is $20 extra."

Customer: "You said an Althon with the DDR RAM and a 7200 RPM hard drive is $1790."

Me: "Fine: $1790 it is. We will use the Seagate drive."

Customer: "No, I don't want crap. You said the Maxtor drive was better. I want that one."

Me: "OK: $1810 it is."

Customer: "But you said $1790 with a 40GB 7200."

And so on ......

What I'm trying to get at here is that it's very difficult to up-sell intangibles. Oh, I do it all the time, after all we don't even try to go toe-to-toe on prices with the fly-by-nighters. But every increase in the price meets with buyer resistance, each step harder than the last. Human nature being what it is, I've often pushed people well past their budgets already, before we get to the details of the hard drive, so in the end if I supply Maxtors instead of Seagates, the end result is simple: I'll get to pay the difference myself.

Oh, if the lesser of the two components in question is genine crap - say, like the old Quantum Bigfoots, or internal modems up until a year or two ago - I'll just tell them they are getting the good stuff and paying for it anyway because we don't sell crap, but there are limits to these things. It doesn't pay to be too rigid.

Hmmm .... I still don't fancy Seagate ATAs though. Looks like I might have to try to side-step it by switching people up to the 60GB Western Digitals - which are quite a bit dearer again, but the punters can see some extra value for their extra dollars, so they will pay it quite happily, most of them. Strange animals, human beings.

 

[Mercutio]

Funny how well that last post goes along with the "systems that sell" thread.

Of course, another way of looking at it is that the faster disk is a slight step closer to SCSI-like speed.

When I run into a situation when I need to sell a higher-priced component but I've already quoted a price, I do the sensible thing: I buy a slower CPU, then let the user know I've made that switch to offer an ultimately better system overall. AU$40 might buy a lot of CPU, though, and I suppose you're stuck with having advertised something.

 

[The JoJo]

Just noticed that 7.2k rpm Samsung drives have arrived in Finland.
I have liked their previous drives very much, so the next computer I'll build for someone is going to have a faster Samsung drive in it.

 

[Tea]

Been looking at the SR review of the new Samsung 7200s. Doesn't look very encouraging. Ever so slowly, they are creeping back to higher seek times. :x

 

[LiamC]

I have had some "difficulties" with WD in the past - poor transfer rates in the main (funnily enough, only on Abit boards) and so tend to avoid them - but I did go and buy a 1000JB for my main system - performance will win out with me every time.

Having said that, I have used a few of Maxtors D740X's in place of IBM's and I think they are very impressive drives. But in Canberra, most dealers stock them fairly cheaply compared to the WD/IBM's so I'm wondering if you get different dealer rates for various drives? Tannin, Can you source the Maxtors from another source temporarily?

 

[Prof.Wizard]

The D740X...

 

[Tannin]

BBF are the only Maxtor distributor that I know of, LiamC. (Woops - just checked, there is Ingram Micro and Digiland. We already buy IBM notebooks from Ingram.) I'll check them out, but we buy a heap of stuff from Westan - WD, Samsung, Mitsubushi, Epox - and we get great prices from them on account of our volume, so I doubt that we will get that anywhere else.

 

[Clocker]

WIth the exception of the 8MB cache WD IDE drive, I think you should go on the premise that the typical user will not be able to tell the different between any two drives of the same generation, spindle speed, size, and interface.

I think you should sell the 7,200 rpm brand that you have found to be the most reliabile. Your customers won't give a crap about the miniscule performance gains between two drives that are almost the same. I think they would be pissed if you didn't give them your most reliable offering though...

C

 

[Tannin]

A healthy dose of common sense there Clocker. I think you are absolutely right.

In the 5400s, I am absolutley wedded to our Samsungs. Roughly 1000 drives now, over a period of two or three years, and not one single in-service failure, just a solitary DOA - and even that drive was not dead, it just detected at the wrong size. We could have three or four Samsung 5400s go faulty tommorow and they would still be the most reliable hard drive I have ever seen.

(I was about to go on about some of the other best all-time drives, reliability-wise, but maybe I'll start a new thread for that.)

I guess one of the reasons that I don't feel as in-touch with drives as I used to, say three years ago, is that since Kristi came to work with me I don't get into the workshop much. We get bored and swap around from time to time, but mostly I do the sales and PR work, she builds the systems and does the repairs. The number of curly ones she gets stuck on and calls me in to help with is getting smaller by the month. I guess I average about one day a week in the workshop now, and sometimes I miss it.

The stuff I do do is mostly the really unpleasant stuff that I figure Kristi will be grateful not to have to deal with - crappy old Pentium-100s with Doublespace, notebooks with no CD-ROM drive, weirdo operating systems, stuff like that. And that is no substitute for the day-in, day-out work I used to do, hand-installing the same version of Windows and the same set of software into a series of similar boxes with near-identical motherboards and the same brand of CD-ROM drive but with different hard drives. Doing that for a while, you get really sensitized to any small differences in performance.

So it's time I started doing some of my own benchmarking once again.

(Time? Did somebody say "time"? Where are you going to get any time from, Tannin?)

I dunno. Maybe next week.

 

[Tannin]

So much for the 5400s. What about the 7200s?

I don't think I can really pick much difference between them, reliability-wise. Kristi and I just discussed this now and agreed that we are not having much in the way of problems with any of them at present.

Maxtor: never sold a Maxtor 7200.

IBM: not sold any IBM drives since our handful of 75GXPs, two of which were DOA but all others are in service with no problems. Not that six or at most ten drives tells us much.

Fujitsu: never sold Fujitsus. So far as I'm concerned, Fujitsu make great air-conditioners.

Seagate: Only sold the occassional Barracuda ATA in the last year or two. Had one or two fail out of .... oh ... maybe two or three dozen. Numbers like these you can't draw much of a conclusion from. Maybe draw a long bow and say the Cuda III was just a fraction fragile, but you need more drives than this to be even a little bit confident.

WD: Sold quite a few WD 7200s, nearly all 20/30/40GB drives from the WD400BB family, and we are struggling to remember how many we have sent back. The trouble is, they look exactly the same as the WD 5400s, so it's one thing to remember sending a WD drive back, quite another to recall which model it was. If I wanted to devote several hours to it I could go back through the fax logs and work it out exactly. No thanks! I know that we have sent some WD 7200s back, at least one, possibly two or three, and that we have sold a small number of hundreds of the drive. Have to say that's a pretty good record - quite possibly the best WD drives we have ever sold.

Samsung: sold maybe one third as many Samsung 7200s as the WD ones. Perhaps a bit less. As yet, zero failures. So, my feeling is that the Samsungs have to be rated as the front-runner in the 7200 RPM reliability stakes (out of the drives we have direct experience with) but we don't have enough 7200 RPM Samsung drives out there in service to be 100% convinced by them yet, not the way we are with their 5400 RPM products.

Conclusions? Keep selling the Samsungs and the WDs, I guess. See if I can't scare up some decent pricing and maybe give the Maxtors a go.

 

[timwhit]

I would whole heartily reccomend going with Maxtor drives, but if you can't find them for as cheap as the Samsungs why bother switching. Especially if they have worked so well for you...

-Tim

 

[Buck]

My personal experience has been good with the WD400BB families (20 GB - 40 GB per platter). No failures yet. I've been interested in trying the Samsung 7,200 rpm flavor.

BR

 

[Corvair]

The Seagate Barracuda Four ATA hard drive has the best spindle in the business today. The Seagate Barracuda Four ATA is also far better than the previous Seagate ATA generation. So, the Seagate Barracuda Four ATA has my vote as the best overall drive available -- for either first or second place on anybody's list.

My only experience with Samsung hard drives was with a Samsung SCSI drive many years ago. It was NOT a good experience to say the least.

 

[Tea]

A Samsung SCSI drive?! Good Lord, I didn't know there was such a thing. I bet it was horrible! I have yet to try the Barracuda ATA IVs, only the marks 1, 2 and 3. Guess I better broaden my experience a bit.

 

[Corvair]

A Samsung SCSI drive?! Good Lord, I didn't know there was such a thing. I bet it was horrible!

Yes, about 10 years ago, a wide SCSI Samsung hard drive in Sun Sparcstation IPX.

I have yet to try the Barracuda ATA IVs, only the marks 1, 2 and 3. Guess I better broaden my experience a bit.

It would be worth your time to get a 20 GB ATA Four for evaluation. I presently use a 40 GB ATA Four here at home. It's fast and VERY QUIET, which is the exact opposite of the Barracuda ATA Three.

 

[Corvair]

I have yet to try the Barracuda ATA IVs, only the marks 1, 2 and 3. Guess I better broaden my experience a bit.

Indeed, the Seagate Barracuda ATA Four is whispery quiet.


Behold:

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200202/20020221IC35L120AVVA07_6.html

 

[Buck]

It is amazing how cool that WD1200JB registered at.

BR