Need help buying a harddrive
 

I have decided run both XP and Linux on my PC,, but leave XP alone on one harddrive and put Linux on a seperate drive. I am looking to purchase this slave drive soon, but I have a few questions.

1.) What manufacturer would you recommend? Does one cater to Linux better than another? Like for example if I was going to buy a Video Card, I would most likely buy one from nVidia rather than ATI, since I feel that nVidia is more willing to support Linux. I basically need something reliable and compatible with Linux.

2.) Also does Linux have a size limit of the harddrive that it can handle? Can it partition a Harddrives only so big?

What other considerations do I need to worry about? Thanks.

any brand will work, shop for best price.

1) For reliability I would go with Maxtor or Western Digital.

2) I have never heard of any compatibilty issues with HDDs.

3) I think there were some limits with early kernels but I think the limits are now neglegable.

i have had some cheap hdd but non of them gave mi any problem

Overall, I'd recommend Western Digital. They're fairly inexpensive, yet offer better performance than many of the other drives out there. As far as capacity, the modern kernels are capable of reading as much as you can realistically throw at it.

while surfing came across this maybe it will we usefull to you

«Moteurzine». -- What is the hardware architecture of Gigablast?

Matt Wells. -- It's just 8 servers that all run Linux. I use a bunch of 160G Maxtor drives, but I don't recommend them. I had to replace one of them after only a few months of service and almost all of the others I have had had write errors at one time or another. If it wasn't for Gigablast's redundancy system I'd have a lot of corrupt data.

I use IBM hard drives. They last longer than other drives. They also use less processing power than other drives. They can sustain huge data throughput. Just three IBM drives will top over PCI throughput when using RAID 0.

Western Digital is good drive for capacity versus performance. They use a little more processing power than IBM hard drives but they are cheaper than IBM.

Maxtor is great for high capacity demands. They use higher processing power than Western Digital.

Seagate drives are great for quiet pc environments but their performance is not jaw dropping like IBM or Western Digital.


BTW, I'm only talking about IDE hard drives not SCSI.

I am defenetly looking for an IDE drive. I have an IDE drive in the machine right now and I don't know who the manufacturere is. It starts with WDC. Does that stand for WEstern Digital corporation? Since the first drive is one brand do I have to buy the second drive of the same brand?

Also What is this Ultra ATA stuff and 7200rpm? What specs should I look for when buying this drive? How does it need to match with the drive I have? Sorry for all the questions, but I have never added another harddrive in a machine before.

1) WDC is Western Digital Corporation like you said.
2) You don't need to add the same type/make of drive.
3) The overall ATA rate of your drive will depend on your motherboards capabilities as well as its own eg:
66 Mobo + 100 Drive = 66 Max
100 Mobo + 100 Drive = 100 Max
100 Mobo + 66 Drive = 66 Max
4) The more rpm (revolutions per minute) the faster your drive and therefore the faster you can access your data (You will also notice a difference in boot times)

In general try to find a 7200rpm drive with a higher or equivilant ATA interface transfer rate to your mobo and with the storage capacity you require (remember to plan or the future).

Three words,


Warrnanty, Warrnanty, Warrnanty.

Three years or don't buy it.

Thanks guys. I think I will go with a 80GB Western Digital drive (ATA/100)all for Linux:D

I am still confused with the ATA/100 and Ultra Ata. What is Ultra ATA? I understand that the device has its own speed and the cable connecting to it can transfer data to other places at a certain speed. SO I am assuming that the ATA/100 means that it will transfer data at 100(whatever units), Correct?

The ATA spec merely specifies the maximum transfer speeds possible on the IDE bus. It does not necessarily mean that your drive will operate at the speed, only that the bus is capable of transferring that amount of data per second.

Ultra ATA is anything that is ATA/66 spec or above. So ATA/100 IS an Ultra ATA drive. As said though, this is it's peak THEORETICAL transfer rate, you'll probably never see it, ecspecially on sustained transfers, but you might once in a while get close to that on burst speed.