I have a Maxtor 7G and 30G and both have operated flawlessly.Have 2 western Digitals both of which have never provided the performance of the Maxtors.The WD's just feel bad. Recommend Maxtor's for stability and from what I've heard from some computer professionals in regards to home computing.

Imtim, I read an article in PC World about hard drives. In both 5400- and 7200-RPM hard drive categories, the Maxtors were the fastest in most cases--just a tad slower, by like a second or two in the 7200rpm. In the 5400 rpm hard drive category, the Maxtor drives smoked the IBM drives.
I havent bought an IBM drive because they're more expensive than any other drive I can buy around here. My Maxtor is very good and very quiet. Western Digital's arent bad, but they are sure noisy. WD's tend to not like to share an IDE channel with another hard drive, but Maxtors dont seem to have a problem with 'em.
I buy locally as much as possible because if something breaks down, you dont have to worry about shipping and if the company will get it back to you. Tiger Direct is the worst. Local prices may be higher than what you can get online, but you will have a better chance of getting the drive replaced and probably much sooner too.

Before any of you guys throw away a crashed IBM hard disk, try the IBM tool from their website. My disk crashed twice from a faulty raid card and the Drive Fitness Test recovered the disk and even some bad sectors

When the drive starts making noises a hard drive really shouldn't, no amount of chkdsk or other utilities is gonna fix it.

My IBM 30GB just died :-( That's 5 drives failed so far out of 11. Not a great ratio.


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Xiven

ABit KT7-RAID D750 @ 850MHz 256MB PC100 RAM Creative Labs 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX (Det 10.8.0) Creative Labs SBLive! Player 5.1 Macronix MX98715 100Mbit/s Ethernet Adapter IBM-DTLA - 307030 30GB Ultra-ATA/UDMA 100 Hard Drive (Primary Master on HPT) Fujitsu MPD3173AT 17.3 GB Ultra-ATA/UDMA 66 Hard Drive (Secondary Master on HPT) Creative DVD-ROM DVD1241E (RPc-1) (Primary Master on IDE) Iiyama Vision Master Pro 451 19" Monitor Cambridge Soundworks DTT3500 Digital 5.1 surround speakers Win2kPro (SP-1) / WinME Dual Boot (so I can play FF7)