Hi, I know this sort of question probably irritates you folks but I am very soon to be buying a new hard disk and I am not really up on whats hot and whats not. I dont have SATA on my mobo and so will be looking at plain old serial ATA. Probably between 80 to 120 gig, 7200rpm. Money is not an issue really, I am willing to pay for quality. Any recommendations on good performers?

The last drive I bought was an 80G Maxtor DiamondMax 9 Plus with 8mb cache buffer. The damn thing is slower than my old 40gig Seagate with 2mb buffer and it makes sudden click noises often when its booting into windows and seeking files?

Any advice will be very much appreciated

Have a look at this WD Caviar 200GB special Edition test:
http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/WDSEHD/index.htm

also look at www.TomsHardware.com

Personally, I am very happy with my 2 x 80GB Seagate Barracuda IV, not the fastest around but very quiet and reliable

Thanks for the review of that drive, it looks very nice but 200gig is a bit too much for me, 120gig is the maximum I'm looking at. Any recommendations for 80 - 120 gig drives?

Actually, I have the 80Gb version of the WD he recommended. I think it's available in sizes b/w 40 and 200 GB. So you should be able to grab the 120 you want. Mine is fast, dependable and very quiet.

I have 2 WD SE 120GB's and they are great.

On another note, if that Maxtor is making clicking sounds and is slow, you might want to check the warranty. That could be one of three things; extreme fragmentation, bad cable connections, or a dying drive. Check the cables, defrag it, and run PowerMax(Maxtor's diagnostic utility)

From what I've seen recently, WD's are a very reliable brand. They aren't TOP on the performance, but very respectable, and reliable.

Maxtors do better in the performance, and are generally reliable, but there's the 1 in some number that does the click of death routine (ala IBM Deathstars).

I got a WD 120 EIDE w/ 8mb cache, no complaints from me.

I have two WD 80 SE with 8 mb cache. As usual no complains with them. They're always working flawlessly.

PCI raid controllers are not worth the money in standard PCI slots - 64bit PCI raid cards might be great but RAID on the 32/33 PCI bus just isnt worth the effort.

Personally I would recommend the Hitachi Deskstar 7k250 range - they are supposidly the fastest 7200RPM HDD's money can buy. However if you want some slightly slower and alot quieter head for a Seagate.

Steg

Samsung Drives

I am going to be upgrading soon and I was looking into the samsung sata drives which have gotten good reviews. I see that rick is using samsung anyone else used these drives, would you recommend them?

Hi again, thanks for the comments. Based on your recommendations I decided to plump for the Western Digital Caviar SE 120gb with 8mb Cache. I placed an order on Dabs.com

I don't think I'll be buying Maxtor drives again tbh. The clicking is bearable because its only intermittent but I have never had it on older drives and so it's not acceptable for such an expensive drive. The clicks come when the drive is seeking, usually for instance when I open up folders with a large amount of content (such as my mp3 folder that has 24gb of music). It also hangs when I leave the folder for a few seconds? This has happened since the day I got it but I just put up with it as it isnt interfering too much with normal operation.

StormBringer, thanks for the suggestions, the cables I are fine and fitted securely and I defrag every couple of months so I dont think its that. The drive was like it since new so I would hope its not about to die. I will try running Powermax like you said and see what happens. I am unsure whether the drive is still under warranty? I purchased it about a year ago now.

Thanks again for everyones input, much appreciated