MaXLine III or Caviar RE?

[Foxie3a]

I ran out of space this week, so it's time to buy another HD. Right now I have a single Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (P-ATA). It works perfectly, and I am impressed. So I can get another one....

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144031

That's a MaXLine III 250GB S-ATA with NCQ and 16mb cache. It's also only 100 bucks.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144407

But the Western Digital looks very nice. Only 8mb cache and no NCQ, but it is 320GB. It's $125. I just get the feeling the WD is a tougher drive, but this Maxtor has yet to give me any reason to try another drive. Right now, I'm leaning towards the WD because I want to try something new, and I like the extra space.

Anyone have any advice?

[Albaholic]

I think it all boils down to personal prefrence. A lot of people are going to have different opinions based on their past experiences. For example, I've had maybe a few maxtors die on me. And in friends computers, I've seen even more broken maxtors. It wouldnt stop me from giving Maxtor another shot, but WD and seagate would have an easier time gaining a purchase from me.

Anyway, all of that aside. It sounds like you're looking more for storage space, so I'd say go for the WD.

[anhvo12345]

I think it all boils down to personal prefrence. A lot of people are going to have different opinions based on their past experiences. For example, I've had maybe a few maxtors die on me. And in friends computers, I've seen even more broken maxtors. It wouldnt stop me from giving Maxtor another shot, but WD and seagate would have an easier time gaining a purchase from me.

Anyway, all of that aside. It sounds like you're looking more for storage space, so I'd say go for the WD.
second that :D

[boris_37]

second that :D


yeah i can't. Since i've always had maxtors and never had one break down i can't say. I've actually never had a hard drive break down at all, i've been quite lucky. So go with whatever you think, usually best deal i'd say go for.

[Quailane]

Why don't you want the 300gig maxline III?

[Foxie3a]

Why don't you want the 300gig maxline III?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144032

Somehow I missed that drive. I'd get the 300 over the 250... Thanks for spotting that out for me.

Hmm...I have had both die on me in the past, but with the enterprise level drives things have been fine.

Even thought the MaXLine III looks like it could be a lot faster, I am going to go with the WD as an experiment, and hope to be happy with the results.

Thx again for spotting that out for me Quailane. :)

[sumpm1]

CHeck the differences is warranty, the maxline has a 5 year warranty

[Albaholic]

wow, 5 years, thats like a scsi warranty, that kind of tips the scales.

[JCLW]

That's because Seagate bought out Maxtor, and Seagate offers 5yr warranties on all their drives.

But you should not be running WD RE drives unless you're running RAID 5 or RAID 6.

On most drives a drive will spend up to 30 secs trying to recover information from a bad sector, and moving it to a "spare" new one. But on RE drives the firmware only spends a few seconds trying to recover the data before marking it bad and relying on the array controller to rebuild the missing data from parity information. They call this "Time Limited Error Recovery". It would be nice if Newegg made this clear on their site.

This is all so that your RAID 5 (or 6) array doesn't time out and mark the drive as failed, and make you go unplug it and then plug it back in again.

The drives will work - but in the event of a bad sector they just won't try very hard to get your data back.

The RE (WD3200SD) is physically the same as the SE (WD3200JD) - just different firmware.

You should be looking at the SE and SE16 WD drives.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136017
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136003

[Quailane]

That is not the only difference, in single drive benchmarks, the SE has a slight lead over the RE versions of the same drive.

[Foxie3a]

JC, thanks for bringing that to my attention. Since this drive will not be used in a RAID array anytime soon if at all.....I think that I should stay away from the RE drives.

Since I know that the MaXLine III works well, and I trust it... I think I'll go with the MaXLine III 300GB.

I don't agree with you on one thing JC... Even though Seagate Acquired Maxtor, the 5 year warranty is not because of that. As far as I know, Maxtor's enterprise drives have always had 5 year warranties.

Is there a difference in hardware between the normal drives and the MaXLines? I think I'll be purchasing the MaXLine tomorrow if no one has any objections. The only thing that makes me worried is that it really advertises its S-ATA2 features that result in performance, when all I'm aiming towards is stability.

So is there any other drive that would be better for stability that is around 250-300GB and only ~$130? Does Seagate have any enterprise IDE drives? I don't care if they all have 5 year warranties.

[JCLW]

The Seagates are on sale: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148110

In my experience it's kind of luck of the draw. You just don't want the drive built on a Firday afternoon.

[Foxie3a]

I had a Seagate OEM drive before. It started to make noises on me so I wanted Seagate ot help me out and they said OEM drives have no warranty. Too bad for Seagate, they lost my business.

I'm buying the MaXLine now. Thanks for help you guys. :)