PC Hardware in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Our Picks

Over the years, we’ve used hard drives from many manufacturers, including Fujitsu, IBM, Maxtor, Quantum, Samsung, Seagate, Western Digital, and others. All of them have made some excellent drives and some mediocre ones, but over the last few years we’ve come to depend exclusively on Seagate (http://www.seagate.com) and Maxtor (http://www.maxtor.com) drives for their performance and reliability.

ATA hard drive

Seagate or Maxtor. If you need an ATA drive, choose a Seagate or Maxtor model of the appropriate size and speed. Both companies offer multiple lines of ATA drives, from 5,400 RPM value models through 7,200 RPM performance models. One of them is almost certainly ideal for your needs. We no longer use Western Digital hard drives because we experienced multiple premature drive failures with various Western Digital models. Although we have never had a premature drive failure with an IBM IDE hard drive, enough of our readers have reported severe problems with some IBM models that we avoid them as well. We don’t have sufficient data to judge the reliability of Samsung models. Our experience is that Seagate and Maxtor ATA drives are fast, inexpensive, and reliable, so that’s what we use and recommend.

SCSI hard disk

Seagate Barracuda and Cheetah series. The 7,200 RPM Barracuda drives, formerly Seagate’s midrange SCSI line, are now their entry-level SCSI drives. The Barracuda blows the doors off the fastest ATA drives, compares favorably in our testing to competing models ...