Best hard drive brand

Seagate is one of the best. When looking for speed, a lot of people go by how fast the drive can spin (10,000 RPM's), but a lot of times what makes a drive faster is the access time for reading the disk. This is stated in milliseconds. You'll want something at least below 9ms.

Hmmm.....where do you base your information on the Seek time?  8.5ms is the seagate and most drives outside of seagate are around 9ms.  I actually studied up on how to buy hard drives a long time ago and a long time ago it was important but...the last time i recalled the seek time was a minor factor in speed nowadays main reason is that the data is usually larger than the buffer or cache so seek time finding files is not an issue.  IE if the cache is not full and the files are really small and can fit many within the 2mb cache or even 8 mb cache, then yes you may want to worry about seek time because that seek time number will allow the drive to "SEEK" the files out faster...But if the files are larger or even 1mb or 512k lets say then the seek time will only be used 2 or 3 times per file or maybe 4 or 5 times if we're talking about the 8mb buffer.  But if the file are larger it will over run the cache so the cache and the drive will have to catch up to the cache.  And in order to do so we're talking about the RPMS....The only time the seek time is going to play a major roll is on smaller files...or MANY files.....and especially SMALL files....The actually rotation speed (RPM's) is a better judge of speed of the drive...anyway here is some information i dug up on how to buy a hard drive and what to look for.

http://www.pcworld.com/howto/bguide/0,guid,20,page,3,00.asp
http://www.geek.com/htbc/buy/harddrby.htm

Sorry themr2man,  I am not really a big seagate fan.  Just have seen alot of returns on them at the store I work at.  those and ibm/hitachi.  Maxtor and WD's have seemed to be pretty stable.  I have also seen potential problems with seagate and another brand drive in the system.  If you slave a Seagate drive with a Maxtor or WDC about 50% of the time both drives fail within one month.  In fact the Seagates from what I can tell (this is my personal opinion as to what is happening, since i do not really know if this is true or not, but I have seen this 4 times now.) If the seagate is hooked up to a different brand drive, the seagate burns up (and actually smokes)  and causes the different brand drive to fail due to the seagate burning up?  or failing etc...Really weird....
However Seen IBM/Maxtor/WDC drives in one machine....have no problems.....for long periods of time...my system is one to look at.  I have IBM/WDC/and maxtor drives in my machine currently (running 6 IDE hdd's)
and they have been working fine for over 1 year.  I haven't added or changed out my drives for at LEAST a year.  and the oldest drives in my machine are about 2 and a half years old.  The newest drives are about a year old or longer.

I had a seagate once...just once.  I returned it a week later

CHAD

I can tell you what not to buy - IBM. As someone who qaa in QA for their HD controllers, I have intimate knowledge of just how badly that company sucks.

I've had good luck recently with Samsung, WD is always a good choice, and Maxtor is hit or miss.

I believe there is/was a large class against IBM for the poor performance of one of their hard drives and a website for interested parties to register their problems/names.

7200rpm, 8MB cache
That's a good thing to see.  Everyone should like Seagate because it's SO GOOD!
Except for Seagate are Maxtor and Western Digital.

Thank you,
Radomir Jordanovic

Well, everyone seems to agree on the WD.     : D

I bought a WD once... just once.... still have it

ROFL

Personally I like Samsung, Maxtor and most of all Seagate Barracuda... I have heard that the 8mb caches aren't all that stable though.

I don't like Samsung, although I still have a Samsung 3.2GB hd from 1999...  Durability is all right, but I like low-noise hard drives!  Seagate wins!  When I installed a Seagate hard drive, I actually thought it was dead.  However, my vote doesn't probably count because I have too many case fans.

I haven't heard anything about stability and 8MB cache hard drives.  How did that come about?

Where did you hear about the 8mb cache problems?  I have not heard anything on that.  

I search a little bit on the net....and all I get is good things about the 8mb cache....not bad....
http://www.decz101.co.uk/hdd%20review.html
http://www.slcentral.com/maxtor-diamondmax-plus9/print.php  (same as the first article but with pictures)
http://www.earthv.com/articles.asp?ArticleID=443
http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/op/cache.html

My friend got a WD hard drive for Christmas.  It's a 120, 7200, 8 and the loading times are very quick.  I have nothing bad to say about it.

Also, I have a good friend with a P 100, 48MBs EDO ram, and an 850MB WD hard drive that still works flawlessly!

The thing about stability on 8mb buffers was something I saw on one of my suppliers sites: http://www.mpcomputersdirect.com/Page.asp?RP=140 scroll down to hard drives.