Don’t ever let someone tell you that all hard drives are the same because they’re full of shit. Some drives are sub-par, such as Maxtor, which I now officially hate (and understand why they are so much cheaper than the other brands). I will never ever ever buy another one. First I had one that was less than a year old suddenly die on me. The data on it was unrecoverable. And now my current one is dragging ass.
Of course, there’s no doubt that Windows has a play in that. A wise friend once said you should reinstall your operating system every six months to keep everything operating at top performance. Joe installed 512 mb of DDR RAM in my machine today, yet my computer was still puttering along. After fighting with Win XP to get the drive back into DMA mode (for whatever reason it reverted to PIO mode), it’s a bit faster, but still not good enough. When my home machine is slower than my work one, we have a problem. So please excuse me while I shop online for a new hard drive and processor…
I like WD better. I got a Maxtor with the computer we bought in December and it failed in Feb. it actually failed durning a Linux install. Nothing was on the drive but still, it sucked.
I have a Fujistu that I had since 97, which is full of errors since the maxtor HD failed durning the linux install, now I am going to have to use linux to fix that drive. I have a WD drive since 01 and its running nice and smooth and it’s been thru hell and back with me ;-)
I reformat my machine, and start from complete scratch every 4-5 months or so. Not so much that my computer needs it, but because I’m anal… the second I start to hear that chugging sound, everything’s gotta go, and I start back all factory-like. There ain’t nothing like a squeeky clean machine. :)
I’ve used drives from a variety of manufacturers over the years. Currently I’ve got some pre-installed Fujitsus, a Maxtor and a Western Digital. The only disk to ever give me any trouble is the WD, which has “played dead” a few times, but it’s always come back. It’s working OK now, but I don’t put anything super important on it for too long, if at all.
That used to happen to me 20 times a month but it has stopped since I got my ibook. Go mac and you’ll never go back. ;-)
Right on, Elizabeth! ;-)
ah yeah, iBook works so well :-)