slowpoke wrote:
malone42, the tech that came here and one on the phone said that maxtor is in very bad shape, that it might go under.
and he also said that he would not get a maxtor, that over the last 6 months, they have gone down hill to fast for him. That he is seeing to much going wrong with brand new HDs from them. This guy also said that he has even replaced alot that are less then a week old
But I guess it is with everything else, you get a good one and nothing goes wrong, get a bad one and hope the new one is good.
as far as getting 2 small HDs, its ok if you don't want to lose anything and you are not recording much if anything. But with me, I have the media center 2005. It doesn't matter that I lost everything, cus what I lost, I could put right back on. The reason for 2-250 GBs and having them on Raid 0 is that it gives me about 140 hours of recording directv on the best recording and more then that with each recording at other settings after I have everything hooked up (scanner, printer, camera, Nortons, dsl,some games and some other stuff) Also with 2-250 Gbs with the Raid 0, that gives me about 466 GBs of capacity were the Raid 1 only gave me about 233 capacity, And the Raid 0 is faster then Raid 1.
When they sent me the 2-80GBs (which they took back) and after I hooked everything up and just did a little recording, I was down to about 30 to 40% of free space. Were as with the 2-250s, with everything hooked up and say about 7 hours of recording, I'm around 90% of free space
I guess it depends on what you are going to use your computer for what size you get
I have built computers for myself and friends since '97, plus help with upgrades and tech support for the ones I built and others. I have used both Maxtor and WD hard drives this whole time. Probably in the neighborhood of 50-70 hard drives. I have never had a problem with a Maxtor or WD drive. I have used both retail, off the shelf drives and OEM drives from different internet stores.
The only hard drives I ever had a problem with was 2 IBM drives. And they became famous for failures and nearly killed IBM's hard drive unit.
The tech guy you spoke with I am sure has seen more HDs, but I can only go on my experience.
In my main computer I used for recording I run a 160 gig HD with two partitions. I use this for my OS, programs and data I am keeping. Then for recording I have 2 200gig drives. I record between 14-21 hours a day on it. So the drives get a real workout. Having 2 drives, or more, gives you more flexibility.
I know about running RAID 0 and RAID 1. I have built systems like that for gamers, and for people that had data they didn't want to loose. I have also built RAID5 systems. Personally I don't like RAID0. It is too easy to have data become corrupt, and you really have very little real boost in speed. When drives were slower it wasn't bad. But with the faster drives and built in cache of 8 or 16MB it really doesn't matter. You are better off running a SCSI hard drive.
A video card has much more to do now with being able to not drop frames than the speed of a hard drive.
If I had to make a guess on why they had so many hardrives failing I would say there are even odds that the systems didn't have good airflow to keep the hard drive cool and that the power supply was probably too small. When I have seen hard drives go bad they were either running too hot or under powered.