Buy HD now, or wait?

[Gremlin2]

Well, the time has come for me to buy a new hard drive or two. I will need them for college this year, but am wondeirng what to do. Should I get a hard drive now, or wait for Serial ATA. I plan on getting a new mobo and Clawhammer when they come out, so it wouldn't be a big deal to get one with Serial ATA as well, provided they will be on the market by then. As far as buying them now, I've narrowed it down to the 80gig Barracuda IV, or the 80gig WDJB. I'll probably end up getting 2 drives, and my main concern is noise, unless there is a big speed difference in the drives. What do you guys think? Will Serial ATA be out by September? Should I get 1 Barracuda and 1 WDJB? Thanks.

[Gremlin2]

How slow will the Segates be compared to the WD? Should I get a WD for my massive storage drive, and a Segate for gaming and booting and such? I'm doing everything I can to quiet my comp down, and the word is Barracuda's are as quiet as it goes. How quiet are the WDJB's?

[Gremlin2]

It appears that the WDJB runs at 35dBA, and the Seagate runs at 24dBA. How big of a difference is that in harddrives? I know that if it was fans, thats a huge difference, but don't know how other hard drives compare to this. Also, I would be getting the drives from newegg, and both are OEM with a 3 year manufacturer warrenty, but I have heard WD doesn't honor OEM warrenty's. Do they, and does Seagate honor them?

[JungleMan]

If I were you I'd go in the middle and get a Maxtor D740X with fluid-bearings. They are not only quiet (not sure if they are as quiet as Seagate..let's say second best though) but they are a lot faster (not as fast as the JBs though).

I have owned three Maxtor drives and they have been great.

I believe they have a good warranty service but thankfully I haven't had to try it yet...

I have a non liquid bearing D740X 80GB and it's fine...

[Parn]

Seagate has superior writing speed, but its reading speed is the last among the most common hard drive manufacturers. You will not find any differences in terms of noise if you have more than 2 fans that are running at 30dBA+.

If you want the best performance, then go with WD. But make sure you buy a retail as the manufacturer doesn't provide warranty for OEM products.

A safer routine is to go with Maxtor as they are only a bit slower than WD, but the manufacturer offers excellent support.

[Gremlin2]

Well, after looking, it appears the Maxtor averages around 27dBA, which would be perfectly fine. Thanks for your help on that matter. Now, onto the newest set of questions since the drive is decided. What is the thing holding back the Maxtor from running ATA-133? Is it motherboard support, cable support, or just the drive not being fast enough(which seems foolish since it's an ATA-133 drive). And what would Serial ATA be compared to? I seem to remember someone saying it would be around ATA-166, but that number just came into my head as the speed of somthing. It might have been SCSI speed being ATA-166.

[Parn]

To use Maxtor D740X with UDMA 6 enabled, you need a motherboard that supports this function. So far, only VIA VT8233A south bridge supports it. D740X is not fast enough to use the full potential of ATA133, so it doesn't make any differences if you use the driver on a motherboard which only supports ATA100.

Serial ATA 2.0(the one that will be released) will be faster than any current IDE standards. I don't know how it will compare to SCSI. But one thing I do know is that some IDE drives are already faster than old SCSI models. Serial ATA is fundamentally different from Parallel ATA, so you cannot use ATA166 to measure its performance. BTW, one Serial ATA channel can only hold one drive instead of two.

[Gremlin2]

And Serial ATA will use brand new hard drives with completely different connectors, correct? Meaning I wouldn't be able to use a S-ATA drive in a regular board with IDE connectors. Basically I'm wondering weather or not you think it is worth the wait to hold off for Serial ATA drives. Will it be a significant improvement over the ATA-100ish speed of the Maxtor?

[JungleMan]

The only instance in which S-ATA from what I see will offer a big performance increase is if hard drives move to 10,000rpm.

Don't worry about compatibility, I think there are going to be converters, and I think IDE will be around for a while.

[JungleMan]

Originally posted by Gremlin2
just the drive not being fast enough(which seems foolish since it's an ATA-133 drive).

That's exactly it. ATA/133 is mostly a marketing ploy...allows for some faster burst speeds but nothing dramatic. It's mostly marketing.

The only useful thing it does it allows drives above 137GB.

[Gremlin2]

Well guys, I appreciate everything you've told me. I'm going to go with the 2 Maxtors, though I think I'll go with two 60gig's instead of 2 80's. That should be plenty of space, and I can just backother stuff up on CD if I need to. Thanks again.

[Shaftski]

I'm running 2 of the 60 gigs on my TX2000 right now, they work OK. Not going to impress you a ton but they get the job done. I've been buying maxtors for years, tried WD once and it was a fast drive but after 1 year started getting bad sectors on me. Maxtors have never failed me, have had great luck w/ them. In fact, I still have an 85 meg maxtor that I got in a 386/16 way back in the day. It was made in 1990 and the thing still works!|