Maxtor or WD? ARGGHHH!

Hey guys, I haven't been on here for awhile, let alone do any PC building for about the past year and a half. I have a problem...I need more space! I'm looking at getting some new hard drives to setup in RAID 1 and replace all my little old crappy drives (I have nothing bigger than 20 GB!). I'm going to be adding them to the first system listed below. I'm going to get a SATA card, since my board doesn't support it, so my first querstion is, can someone recommend a good one? Second I'm looking at the drives, and though I've always been a Maxtor fanatic (every one of my drives is Maxtor), I'm also liking the WD Caviars, especially since I just read that they lowered the thermal output.
Here's the advantages to each as I see them:

Maxtor:
16MB cache (really the only reason I would consider going with Maxtor at this point)

Western Digital:
Fluid Dynamic Bearing = QUIET
Less Heat

Basically, can anyone tell me which is faster and quieter. That's the one I want. Anyone who has experience with both, please help me.

The WD is going to be quieter but I think the Maxtor is going to be faster. Read some reviews on specific models you are interested in.

I currently run 1x Maxtor 120 GB SATA, 1x 160 GB Samsung SATA, and 2x Seagate 160 GB IDE's. The Maxtor is definitely the loudest. The Seagates are quiet but there is a high pitched whine that I can detect. The Samsung SP drive is dead silent and it performs too (my favorite of the bunch). I've also owned two WD 160 GB IDE drives but they were defective so the got returned.

IMO Maxtors are better than WD, I had a WD die on me once and the Maxtor I have in my pc is fast and reliable and I have never had any problems with it.

willkill1337 said:

IMO Maxtors are better than WD, I had a WD die on me once and the Maxtor I have in my pc is fast and reliable and I have never had any problems with it.

Click to expand...

I agree somewhat, because I saw a WD HDD fail before. They usually fail with bad sectors. I had an early version, a 1 GB version fail on me if an interesting way:

Literally only 238 MB of the HDD was accessable. Any attempt to access beyond
238 MB of the HDD just caused to HDD to click repeatedly and the OS to lock up. Even SpinRite failed.

Also saw another 1 GB WD HDD before the above incident just start getting bad sectors.

You should also consider hitachi. I just bought a 160 GB SATA drive for 94!
My friend builds ALL his pc's w/ them.....GREAT drives. Silent cool....CHEAP!!!!
He put the SATA connector on backwards once burnt the HD up....they replaced it on his OWN error....WD is great,EVER pc i have and probly almost ever had (custom built even my moms dell) WD's I just ordered a raptor too the 16mb cache should help a lot,However maxtor seems to be about 50-50 with happieness noise ect. Any harddrive today really cant be bad. Ide go with whatever is most quiet.

capmuffin said:

You should also consider hitachi. I just bought a 160 GB SATA drive for 94!
My friend builds ALL his pc's w/ them.....GREAT drives. Silent cool....CHEAP!!!!
He put the SATA connector on backwards once burnt the HD up....they replaced it on his OWN error....WD is great,EVER pc i have and probly almost ever had (custom built even my moms dell) WD's I just ordered a raptor too the 16mb cache should help a lot,However maxtor seems to be about 50-50 with happieness noise ect. Any harddrive today really cant be bad. Ide go with whatever is most quiet.

Click to expand...

i just bought a samsung 160gig sata for 60$ at microcenter in houston