Hard Drives

[grouch]

Hey all
Deciding to buy a new hard drive soon, but just want some opinion.
my purpose: storage drive to be used for burning, maybe raid later on.
1. I've heard of many hard drives dying, so if you had one die on you let me know (brand).
2. NCQ - any use?? can i raid with one NCQ and one without??
3. 16mb vs 8mb - opinions?? can a 8mb work with a 16 mb in raid??
4. Noise. I've had 3 hard drives in one system b4 and it was noisy, so if you've had experience with many, let me kno which one is quietest (or anywhere i can see some tests between Maxtor/WD/Seagate).

Thanks.

[dodecahedron]

between Maxtor/WD/Seagate, Seagate are the most quiet.
Samsung are even more quiet than Seagate.

[Han]

For RAID you should have identical drives...

[Boba_Fett]

Hey all
Deciding to buy a new hard drive soon, but just want some opinion.
my purpose: storage drive to be used for burning, maybe raid later on.
1. I've heard of many hard drives dying, so if you had one die on you let me know (brand).
2. NCQ - any use?? can i raid with one NCQ and one without??
3. 16mb vs 8mb - opinions?? can a 8mb work with a 16 mb in raid??
4. Noise. I've had 3 hard drives in one system b4 and it was noisy, so if you've had experience with many, let me kno which one is quietest (or anywhere i can see some tests between Maxtor/WD/Seagate).

Thanks.

1. All HDDs die. Its just a matter of when the die. I would stick to WD and Seagate for long life HDDs.

2. NCQ can only be enabled on the newest Intel and nvidia Nforce4 mobos, apparently there is a nice speed boost there.

3. The extra cache probably won't result in anything noticeable. Use identical drives in a RAID array.

4. Seagate is the least noisy. Pretty much all HDDs made today arn't noisy at all (except for high speed 10000RPM drives from WD and all SCSI drives).

[hoxlund]

i absolutely love my new raptor 36gb, wish i would have boughten one a lot sooner

if your looking for performance then why are you also looking for a quiet drive, almost always they don't go hand and hand

other then that i have all hard drives maxtor except my WD raptor, and all hard drives in my system are SATA 8MB

xbox also runs a maxtor 250gb 8mb