How Old is Your Working Hard Drive?

[ripken204]

I Have a WD thats about 15 Yrs old , I think, but not sure (Still Works, I brought it to school and hooked it up to a pc and it still works)

wtf! how big is it both physically and in tembs of megabytes. and how about what speed is it?

[Nerwin]

I dont remember, but I think its like 750MB's i dont know the speed but i think its around 500 RPM'S sorry I wish I knew but its at school, being used as a door stop in the Server room (My Computer Guy's Office)

When i work there was either DOS or Windows 3.0, I'm not sure

But its like 15 to 25 years old, i can't tell, I just thought it was around 15yrs but not sure.

Edit: Its fits in 3 5.25 bays thats all what i know what the size is its HUGE. The temps I really dont know.

Edited July 26, 2006 by computerMan

[n7Epsilon]

I have a 200 MB 3200 RPM Seagate, that works silently but horribly slow with zero bad sectors, use it for small text files... (maybe a hard drive for my SmoothWall).

[ripken204]

omfg thats huge. try fitting that into a htpc

[spacesurfer]

All right. Thanks folks for you votes.

I ended up buying a Maxtor SATA II 300 Gb HDD. It's big enough for my needs.

[prx984]

All right. Thanks folks for you votes.

I ended up buying a Maxtor SATA II 300 Gb HDD. It's big enough for my needs.

wow thats a... thats a... huge drive

glad you got it though.

happy computing!

[Macstorm]

About 5y old 80GB Maxtor working like new

[spacesurfer]

wow thats a... thats a... huge drive

I didn't think that it was that huge... they make drives as big as 750 Gb now-a-days. Of course, they cost more than $400 - $500.

Edited August 4, 2006 by spacesurfer

[03GrandAmGT]

I still have a working Seagate ST225 20mb MFM drive in a xt. And a working Maxtor (MXT-540S) 540 meg scsi for one of my Amiga's. Tried to vote but kept getting an error. Anyway 1 Seagte >5yrs and 1 Maxtor >5 yrs.

The error returned was:

You did not choose a poll choice to vote against. Please go back and ensure you click on one of the radio buttons next to the choice you wish to vote for

jd

[prx984]

I still have a working Seagate ST225 20mb MFM drive in a xt. And a working Maxtor (MXT-540S) 540 meg scsi for one of my Amiga's. Tried to vote but kept getting an error. Anyway 1 Seagte >5yrs and 1 Maxtor >5 yrs.

The error returned was:

You did not choose a poll choice to vote against. Please go back and ensure you click on one of the radio buttons next to the choice you wish to vote for

jd

you have to vote for each thing in the poll i think. i did that to me too the first time i went to vote in it.

I didn't think that it was that huge... they make drives as big as 750 Gb now-a-days. Of course, they cost more than $400 - $500.

that is a big drive, i still think my 80gb is huge

[ripken204]

you have to vote for each thing in the poll i think. i did that to me too the first time i went to vote in it.

yes you do, i just added N/A option to the poll so that should cover it

[03GrandAmGT]

you have to vote for each thing in the poll i think. i did that to me too the first time i went to vote in it.

yes you do, i just added N/A option to the poll so that should cover it

Very Good ripken. Just voted, thanks.

jd

[spacesurfer]

that is a big drive, i still think my 80gb is huge

I was thinking about buying another one - a 160 Gb Maxtor PATA for my HDD enclosure as a backup drive.

Micro Center has it for 29.99 after a rebate of 60.00. Aug 3-6 is a tax-free day in Georgia!

I bought a 100 Gb SATA Maxtor a while back from Micro Center that was same price - 30.00 after rebate of 70.00. I did get my rebate back.

[nfm]

I have a 250GB Maxtor that is ~2.5+ years old and it's already near dead. My PC will frequently bsod because of it, hdd will suddenly rebooot itself, as if you woul unplug power cable and plug it in while pc is powered and it will stop spinning completely. Sometimes it won't turn at all, sometimes it works whole week non-stop, but none of the data is corrupted so far.

This is a second maxtor that I see happening to it, I will never buy one again. I found out that hitachi and especially seagate hdds are the best.

I never owned wd so I can't comment on that. Also all of my maxtors are really loud, especially one that runs on my xbox, when I load a game such as halo2 that loads pretty long time, you can hear terrible scratchu sounds from it like it was just about to die. I think that those come with stock acoustic (or something like that) disabled and that's why they make a lot of noise. Maxtor provides some utilities that with you can diable those features on your hdd.

[CoffeeFiend]

Personally, as long as it's not western digital...

Just bought 6 new Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA2 3GB/S 7200RPM 16MB Cache NCQ HDs. 110$CAD a pop, not bad (34 cents/GB). Will work great in RAID5 (1.6TB total) on an ASUS M2N-E motherboard If you count the "space lost" for parity and add tax and shipping, it's still under 50 cents/GB.

As for the 750GB'ers, they're coming down in price a lot. They're currently 520$CAD here, but that's still a LOT more per GB than the smaller drives (69 cents/GB - so the double!) If you need a lot of space, you also need a lot of money to buy it with large drives like these (it already costed me like ~800$CAD w/tax & ship for the bunch of 320GB'ers - that much space at twice the price per GB? Ouch! Can't afford that - or at least different priorities!) And if you want a RAID5 array (so if one drives dies, you don't lose everything), you also need to buy a bunch (preferably 4 or more), so again a big investment. For the price of one 750GB drive, you can almost buy five 320GB'ers (can't buy 4.7 drives), and you'd end up with twice as much storage space (that's what I did, just add a 6th drive for parity!)

The only problem with buying smaller drives is the low number of SATA ports on motherboards these days (which is half the reason why I picked that board - it has 6!) Half-decent SATA RAID cards (even software RAID) with enough ports are way too expensive (several hundreds) for home use, and even "cheap" PCI (not PCI-[e|x]) non-RAID SATA controllers are a pain (hard to find here, and usually cost as much as a new basic motherboard with SATA - 70$ or more) and being PCI they're slow too.

[edit]

Kamil: chances are you already know... But those molex connectors (the pins) can become loose too. It gives the same problem you described, so I thought I'd mention it anyways.

And I have a bunch of maxtors, which are doing just fine.

Edited August 5, 2006 by crahak