Best SATA hard disk ?
It seems that it’d be Western Digital WD4000YR. Check this out : 400 GB capacity, 16MB buffer, uses WD’s Raptor technology heavily, beats pretty much all other SATA hard disk in various benchmark, and so on.
A bit of history; I bought 2 WD Caviar SE 120 GB, the ones with the (then) phenomenal 8 MB buffer, making it the (then) fastest ATA hard disk. Unfortunately, they seems to be not very reliable, with both already dead.
Reading the review above, it seems that WD has fixed this issue.
It seems to be THE hard disk to buy if you’re a power user.
Do you agree ? Let me know.
November 7th, 2005 07:28
WDC comes with 5 years warranty in Singapore and USA, and I hope also worldwide. How about Indonesia? Do you exchange yours?
November 8th, 2005 00:45
Which is better? Using many smaller capacity drives in RAID(+LVM), or just one gigantic capacity drive?
Then again, the definitions of “small” and “gigantic” shift quickly.
November 8th, 2005 03:16
#3: what i don’t like about RAID: by the time you need to replace a disk, you will need to replace it with one with several times the capacity of the old disk, and left a huge part of the new disk unused.
November 14th, 2005 09:09
#1 - unfortunately, I bought those drives in UK, and now I live in Indonesia. So returning those drives back are (pretty much) impossible / is not something feasible to do.
#2 - if it’s one big drive versus RAID 0, then the better one is to stripe it / RAID 0. But since this decreases MTBF significantly (increasing chance of disk failure), then you’ll need to have a reliable backup/restore procedure.
btw; LVM is very cool, got the chance to use it in FC3; very useful and convenient when I needed to change the hard drive with bigger one. This is one feature that makes Linux move even closer to being an “enterprise-level” operating system.
Hopefully it’ll become the default in more Linux distros.
January 10th, 2007 21:49
While working on my HP Pavillion 734n last night, my screen suddenly went blank, and the PC appeared to lose all power.
I unplugged the unit and tried to restart it.
However, when I pushed the button to restart it, the yellow light on the front of the unit stays on for approx 10 seconds, then goes off. The fan appears to be running, but the hard drive doesn’t seem to be kicking in!
Could the hard drive have ‘crashed’ while I was in the middle of working in it?
The computer is about 3 years old and hasnt been moved or exposed to any change in conditions, nor have I changed any sytems / programs, etc. In fact, I had no indication that anything was wrong until it suddenly ‘died’.
Any advice on what I can do to try and re-boot it or save the hard drive ?
Stupid me has all of the kids summer photos on the hard drive that hadn’t bene backed up yet !!!
Thanks in advance !
January 11th, 2007 12:09
Hi Bob,
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Try these:
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1. Buy a new hard drive, and install Windows on it
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2. Plug the died hard disk into the computer
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3. Install data recovery software such as the one from OnTrack, or others.
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Reason being, sometime a dead hard disk is not really thoroughly destroyed. Part of it is still accessible.
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Software such as the one I mentioned above ***usually*** is able to access the good bit of that died hard disk, and recover some of your data. Which is still way better than losing all of it.
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Hope it helps.
March 26th, 2008 02:37
For my personal experience SATA hard disk works very well. I always prefer SATA hard disk. The processing od data is also fast. Recovering data from your computer can be a confusing experience at best. If we lost data in the computer we can’t retrieve. There are some possibilities to data recovery. For more information move to the given link.
June 20th, 2008 21:04
Hello! I read this guide to online backup and must admit it’s great. Complete, thorough and not too complicated. Download the Pdf file