New internal hard drive?

[L]

Any suggestions?  Any good deals anyone's aware of?  My old 80 internal is getting near capacity, and my two 120 externals are already filled to the brink with movies and anime.

[Vodka7]

Right now I'm running two of Maxtor's 300 gig MaxLine III drives and one of Seagate's 400 gig 7200.10's, all internal, all PATA (EIDE).  No complaints with any of them, been using the oldest one (one of the two Maxtor's) for around two years now.  I add to my collection and replace dead drives as the sales happen, but if I remember right the most expensive one was the Seagate, at around $120 before rebate.  Anything 300-400gigs is so cheap right now you don't really need to wait for a sale, Newegg or Outpost should both have a few under a hundred bucks.  I wouldn't recommend going any bigger than that on a single drive for a while, the price jump isn't worth it and I don't consider the tech mature enough to trust.

Hard drives are like printers, though--you ask enough people and you'll hear that every brand is absolutely, postively the worst product ever created and can only be relied upon to burn your house down and kill your cat.  That said, I've had bad experiences with IBM (oh Deskstar, why oh why did I rely on you) and Western Digital.

[BryanP]

For the most part, the big-name consumer drives are fairly close in quality.  Western Digigal, Maxtor and Seagate all work about the same.

A word of caution about those external hard drives:  assuming those are in USB enclosures, do not assume the data is as safe as it would be in your pc.  Most USB enclosures have no intelligence in their controller circuitry.  They don't spin down the drives.  Ever.  If they have power they're spinning the drives constantly.  This greatly reduces their lifespan.   I consider USB externals to be nothing more than really big transfer / scratch drives for that very reason.

[Vodka7]

A word of caution about those external hard drives:  assuming those are in USB enclosures, do not assume the data is as safe as it would be in your pc.  Most USB enclosures have no intelligence in their controller circuitry.  They don't spin down the drives.  Ever.  If they have power they're spinning the drives constantly.  This greatly reduces their lifespan.   I consider USB externals to be nothing more than really big transfer / scratch drives for that very reason.

It's true that external drives won't spin down, but it's not true that spinning down will reduce the lifespan of a drive.  In fact, it's the opposite--spinning down a drive is 100% a power saving feature, and actually does more harm to a drive than leaving it spun up 24/7.  The main thing to worry about with an external exclosure is the heat from running a disk constantly, but even a good passive external enclosure is enough to keep the drive running for years.

The problem with spinup/spindown is the stress it puts on the bearings in the drive's motor--the bearings are rated for a certain number of cycles, not a certain number of years, and each spinup/spindown cycle is going to be bringing them one step closer to failure.  They're designed to spin constantly at a certain RPM, and keeping the drive constantly running does so; spinning the drive up and down puts them under a greater stress.  There are some people who worry that leaving the drives on permanently will negatively affect the lubrication in the drive, but that's more an issue of poor temperature than purely friction.  Again, a good enclosure will solve that problem.

[wingnutx]

My big drive has been throwing controller errors lately, so looks like I need to at least start getting regular backups.

Time for a 300 gig in a USB enclosure.

[zahc]

It's my opinion that temperature cycling is the hardest thing on hard drives.