> I need to buy a new Hard drive, size around 40 Gb.
>
> Any recommendations?
>

In years past I bought a fair number of Western Digital drives, mainly
because their price was better for the size, and they came with a longer
warranty period than other companies (3 years, when most others were 2 --
not sure if that's still the case).  Those two factors, particularly the
latter, were my primary factors in the choice.

I did have several of those drives fail over the years, fortunately always
within the warranty period.  But after a while (and after one too many Win
reinstalls) I thought, instead of this just being random failure that the
warranty should protect me from, perhaps WD really does have a reliability
problem that outweighs their other advantages.  Or rather, I felt it was
just a poor, bean-counting based decision of WD's, that paying for
replacements of drives that failed under warranty was less expensive than
paying for decent quality inspection on ALL the drives coming off of the
assembly line.  (In other words, let the end users be the QC inspectors, for
free.)  Sad to say that this is probably true, and if a company doesn't care
about their "reputation" for high reliability/quality, then the numbers
would back up this policy.  The state of accounting-driven business in
America, I'm afraid.

So, I made it a point to buy someone else's drive the next time I needed
one, and I got a Maxtor last time around, when I added a big partition to
store captured video from my DV camcorder, for editing purposes.  For that
use, the speed of the drive was the most critical factor (RPM and UDMA/66
capability).

That was about a year and a half ago.  My system has been stable, with a
large WD holding my OS and data and apps (30GB), a smaller WD holding my
swap/temp stuff and my installed-program archive files (6.4GB - this one was
the replacement for one of the old failed drives), and the 27GB Maxtor
holding video and some CD disk-images.  I also have a 20GB WD on my second
machine, that one also being one of the warranty replacements.

So I guess my point is that (a) I got disenchanted with WD, although lately
the three that are currently running here have been fine for a good while
[finally got rid of the bad units, I guess], and (b) I'd still use warranty
length as an important factor, at least until you settle down with a brand
that you like.  For certain purposes, speed considerations will trump the
other criteria, but since you don't want to buy a UDMA card [which is what I
had to do], then I'd probably stick with the old price+warranty-length
method.

If I were buying another drive today, I'd probably go with another Maxtor.
It's performed perfectly, is more than fast enough for my DV application
(although now I'd get a 10,000 RPM unit for that purpose, instead of this
7200), and the price was good (shop around to compare, deals vary widely.
Buy.com has good prices, I've found).  I've heard good things about IBM's
drives, although I haven't had any opportunity to shop for them and compare
prices, so I don't know if they compete in this area or not.

One note I have here that I did make to myself when I installed the Maxtor,
which may not be relevant to you though -- the Maxtor's "MaxBlast" install
software couldn't see drives that were attached to my Promise UDMA66 PCI
card, rather than my (DMA33) motherboard IDE channels.  Fortunately, WD's
equivalent program, "Data Lifeguard Tools" worked fine for the Maxtor drive,
and I got it set up and identified properly using that one instead.  I don't
know if Maxtor has fixed whatever was wrong with MaxBlast in the time since
I installed this drive (Feb 00).  I would hope so, there are a lot more
add-on UDMA cards out there now than back in early 2000.  It probably
doesn't matter if you're putting the drive on mobo IDE.


So, that's my nickel.


Eileen Lehner
8/16  0952edt

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