Vesalia's Seagate HD?

[MAD]

Hoya!

OK, this sucks!

After FOUR (4) HDs I had to bring back to the shop, I asked the owner of the shop (who looked oddly at me when I mentionned AMIGA and told me that it would be wise to flash the Ammy's mobo in order to have her recognising those blinking Maxtor HDs) to refund my money. He will do so at the end of the month.

In the meantime, I will buy a new HD from the net, a 80 GB from Seagate. Vesalia seems OK and their prices seem pretty fair. What do you think.

Moreover a good friend of mine got many Ammies and WinUAE. Would the latter accept an actual HD and format it for Ammy? Do not worry, I have the actual 3.1 ROMS and 3.9... :-)

I have to use such a solution because, as you know, my 060 is dead and no 060 means no SCSI and, thus, no CD-rom... Which implies no bloody OS 3.9!  :pissed:

Hope you can help me!

Be funky

M A D

[Lando]

Flash the Amiga's motherboard?  How, exactly?

It reminds me of the time I went into an Escom shop in Newcastle (just a few months after Escom had bought Amiga) to buy a hard drive for my A1200 and was told by the Escom store manager that only SCSI hard drives worked in Amigas and they only sold IDE....

Vesalia are very good.  You can buy from them with confidence.

[mikeymike]

Currently, and for the last few years, I've trusted Seagate hard disks.  They haven't let me down yet.

(In my experience) The drives I've seen fail the most are Western Digital.  Next are Maxtor, then IBM.  I've seen one Seagate HD fail, and two I've heard of recently failing, a friend of mine's PC, but then his PC was a total bar heater, and I think that hard disks are far better off being kept as cool as possible.

[Bezzen]

Am I the only one who never had any problems with hard drives? (except the occasional trying to get all gigs available when partioning and formatting). I've never actually had any drive fail for me, and I have had a few different ones during the years.

I guess writing this message though, has made my current hard disk doomed.  :nervous:

[Brian]

@Bezzen
Oddly older harddrives tend to just work and work and work.. my 3.2Gb Quantum Fireball from 96 (yes it was bloddy expencive) or so haven't had a hickup.

You're last statement will however catch the eye of the "all crapps law" keeper and I can see him standing there adding you to the list of "things to come". ;-)

@MAD
Seagates latest drives come with a 5year warranty so I'd say they are a pritty good buy. Got myeslf one of them 160GB ones not that long ago and it's pritty quiet.

Maxtor does not have clearance to my hardware... they whine, they smoke and often that adds up to they don't work. Now that said it's based on my experience of them in the past (haven't touched one for years due to almost lethal alergic reactions ;-)).

[mikeymike]

Bezzen wrote:
Am I the only one who never had any problems with hard drives? (except the occasional trying to get all gigs available when partioning and formatting). I've never actually had any drive fail for me, and I have had a few different ones during the years.

Bear in mind that my experience includes about 50 PCs I've built and maintained, plus customer PCs (I'm self-employed, computer fixing business).

Personally (Home PC) I've had one hard disk die on me, an IBM one, one of the imfamous "DeathStar" range.

[srg86]

Hi

I've personally have never had any new hard drive die on me. Since 1997 I've had new drives almost exclusivly by Quantum and Maxtor. They are quiet, stable, reliable and the Maxtor Fireball 3 is almost completly silent.

BTW my main PC's OS hard drive is running on a 2001 IBM Deskstar 60GXP, it's been perfect.

I have had old second hand drives die on me, mainly by seagate (could be because of the the mail though I suppose).

BTW My original A1200 had a Connor 245MB drive, I had no trouble with it.

srg

[Piru]

I've found Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 drives excellent; quiet, fast and reliable. They have 5 year warranty now, too.

I've got ST3120026A 120GB, 8MB cache.

[srg86]

Piru wrote:
I've found Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 drives excellent; quiet, fast and reliable. They have 5 year warranty now, too.

I've got ST3120026A 120GB, 8MB cache.

hmm, I'm planning on getting a WD Raptor next for my PC.

srg

[Piru]

@srg86

Sure go ahead.

I'm not saying WD are crap, I'm just saying I've found Seagate good.

[Holley]

You can't really argue with a 5 year warranty, but out of approximately equal numbers of harddisks I've had they were (in terms of failures) a couple of hundred Fujitsus, about 30 seagates, 2 Maxtors and none of the old 4.5Gb Samsungs.

At home at the mo I have Maxtor 20 and 40 Gb harddisks, a 30Gb Hitachi, and a 4.5 Gb IBM in the A3000, all of those work fine.  The 1.0 Gb Maxtor I bought in early '96 is still alive and kicking in my sister's PC, too (she uses it for Fortran under Linux).

Everyone has their own favourites I guess ...

[Brian]

GRRRRRRRRRRRR! :madashell:

My 80GB IBM DescStar started klicking and downing XP for me about a month ago and subsequently got booted for an 160GB Seagate disk. Today my 2GB IBM TravelStar in my A1200 starts klicking like mad on bootup and every now and then when sitting idle so I'll have to go hunt for a 2.5" disk now aswell! :bigcry:

I'm so phreakin pissed at those crapp IBM disks right now! What good does it do if they are cheap when they only live for 3 years? :pissed:

[Hyperspeed]

I once bought a hard disk from Anal-Logic and it was a 510mb Quantum Daytona.The sub-brand was Go-Drive® and it gave me no end of trouble.

It was a little 2.5" laptop drive and after trying to get it work for months I was told by Wizard Developments (/Compute!) that Go-Drive® don't work on Amiga.

Last year I bought a 2Gb Seagate Barracuda 3.5" SCSI drive but sold it after a few months because it got extremely hot. Whether this was a sign of bearing failure I don't know but I don't like to see a hard disk getting hot.

I also bought a 2.5" 540mb IBM IDE drive and that seemed a little wobbly... powering up sometimes, not on others.

One thing I thought about the A1200... there is nothing physical on the internal IDE port to stop you inserting the ribbon the wrong way around. I can see a little zero printed on the motherboard near the port, just wondering if this indicated the red powerline pin on the ribbons.

It's not as logical as looking at the way the ribbon comes out of a drive (if the drive is sold minus the ribbon).

The drives I trust the most are Quantum Fireballs. I have two SCSI drives and they are fast and reliable, even though one is slightly louder than the other (wonder if a seal is not making contact).

As for using 80Gb+ drives on an Amiga, I find this extremely dangerous even on OS3.9. How do you manage for recovery? Is it not better to get a removeable medium like a Jazz drive or a RAID array if your into file serving/media collecting?

@MAD: I know what you mean, if you disable the Blizzard 1260 your SCSI goes with the CPU. So you have to revert to IDE or floppy! Why this when the memory and clock stay!?

:-)

The most award winning drives out there now are the Maxtor ones with those blue cases. Can't remember what they're called, MediaDrive or something? Some are even 15,000rpm SCSI drives.

For me, a migration to solid state couldn't come sooner. I wonder if it'd be fun to set up a Compact Flash RAID array!

:-) :-) :-D

[B00tDisk]

Bezzen wrote:
Am I the only one who never had any problems with hard drives? (except the occasional trying to get all gigs available when partioning and formatting). I've never actually had any drive fail for me, and I have had a few different ones during the years.

I guess writing this message though, has made my current hard disk doomed.  :nervous:

THe only HD I've ever had just flat out DIE on me (that wasn't broken from the factory) was a Maxtor 170mb IDE drive that I had for YEARS and kept my pathetic Cyrix Pr166 (think 133mhz Pentium, yet without any sort of FPU) based system running with.  It had permanent bad sectors on it that always seemed to hose the Windows registry.  So when someone gave me a 100mb HD, I double-spaced it and installed Windows '95 there - no problemo!

Anyway, this Maxtor was so badly broken that the last time I attempted to use it (I was trying to build my own firewall/router system and wanted a minimal HD in it for logging purposes), when I tried a low-level format through the systems BIOS, it hit the bad blocks and caused the computer to reboot.  So I tried a format through DOS - same thing.

I yanked that sucker out and threw it in the dumpster, happy that I had my brand new HUGE 2.1gb HD!

EDIT: Also, with the exception of the infamous IBM Deathstar drives, I've not seen one drive fail more often than the other.  Again, I've gotten drives that were bad from the factory, but not otherwise...

[vpcs]

I've had more Maxtors fail then anything else. Seagate is the way to go ofter about 100 different seagate drives I haven't lost 1 yet. Western Digital comes in 2nd best...