What size hard drive offers the best value?

What drive offers the best value AND performance?

  • 20 gig

  • 40 gig

  • 60 gig

  • 80 gig

  • 100 gig

  • 120+


Results are only viewable after voting.

rinse

www.visualrinse.com
Im thinking of getting a new drive... probably maxtor (though i might be swayed if you have a good arguement) and im definitely getting a 7200rpm drive... the real question then lies in what size should i get?

Are there issues where the drives perfomance starts to lag on a large drive?

Is a 40GB drive a ripoff for its size?

Help me please!
 
good way to phrase the question rinse. Let me reiterate what i have said before on this subject. you might notice that i have an 80 and a 40 as external firewire drives. I had the 80 first. I got the 40 because the 80 was just too much trouble. After it got to be a little over half full, it began to take tediously long times to do almost anything with. It takes forever to search, forever to run diagnostics and repairs, forever to defrag, forever to to do anything that requires scanning it. It also increases intial boot times as it must access larger amounts of volume info. In general it is more of a pain than a great thing. also keep in mind that you will lose a certain percentage of it to formatting and it really only turns out to be a 75. while this holds true of all drives, it becomes much more evident when 5 gb just seem to disappear.

While the amount of files, and the size of files has a lot to do with this, it is my experience that up to about 40 is reasonable. after that it starts taking more time than it is worth. My 80 has taken almost 24 hrs to run repairs on and over 13 to defrag at times. and without degragging, it is a nightmare of screeches and delays.

but if you are planning to fill a large drive with a few large files like video captures, then a larger one might be ok. Otherwise, at a certain point you are paying for more headaches than utility. In the future i do not plan to buy anything larger than a 40.

i would also add a word of warning about maxtor's customer service. it is more like dis-service. While mine works fine, it is because of the vast amount of troubleshooting i have done. Maxtor's service people have been some of the stupidest people i have ever dealt with. when i first set mine up i had difficulties. their answer was for me to return the drive to rule out a faulty unit before they would even attempt to give any further help. After having solved the isue on my own, i wrote them several times about it and never even got a reply back acknowledging my email. so if customer service is important to you, i would look around some more.
 
thanks for the input... this drive would largely be used for mp3s and garphics files and possibly some light/hobbyist video work from time to time.

ed's input is kinda what i was looking for.... i may just buy a 40 gig drive, but the thought of aadding an additonal 80 to my internal 40 sounds really nice... 120 gigs is a ton of space.
 
the mp3's are definitly going to be the kind of files that slow you down after a certain point as well as quantities of web graphics. like i said earlier, the large video files shouldn't be much of a problem as they take up lots of space but no real additional volume info. I think t h gave the theoretical reasons that things work the way they do in my examples. in fact i found t h's post to be quite informative and supportive of my experience.

you might want to try a 60 or 80 if you are going to do the ocassional video work. just keep a watch on the drive and make sure you don't start to excede 40 gb with your smaller files. Believe me, you will notice when you hit that point. I keep putting off moving about 20 gb of files over to my 40 to make them about even in filled space and then seeing how the 80 works with vids. i guess i would think that $40 to $60 would make it worth it to go ahead and spend now on 20 extra gb to have around for capture purposes. much beyond that and my original advice seems better.

one thing i would do before deciding on a brand is check websites to make sure the manufacturer is making updated drivers and/or firmware available. both of my drives had old versions by the time i bought them. the acom people were great about helping me update even though their site is basically nonfunctional. like i said before, maxtor is pitiful about this although they did finally release an update. unfortunately they haven't addressed issues with osx yet. which is why i keep putting off doing the transfer, it will only read large quantities of files for copying while in os 9.
 
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