I am about to get a new HD. I was thinking in gettting a Western Digital.

I would love to get my hands in a IBM HDD but they are not exaclty cheap :P

I like IBM (you know "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" ;-) , but the brand is not so importend, thus some parts are from the same factory...

Maxtor and especially Caviar begin to make terrible noise when they getting older.

Just get one with a longest warranty. Different drives give different results.
Seagate and Maxtor are good drives, with good warranty. I just had a Maxtor
that I put in a customers comp in Nov go bad and they replaced it - no problem.
You might want to consider the price difference between a 2MB cache and a
8MB cache. Also, get a 7200RPM drive. As for ATA100 vs. ATA133, the
performance difference isn't that great - I wouldn't pay more than 10% - 20%
more for the ATA133. Just personal opinion, but I dislike WD.

Edit: check to see if your motherboard will support the drive you're going to get.

Just keep away from any Samsung disks... :-)

I've always recommended WDs since I've never had problems with them, but I've seen a few online posts about them dying, most of my mates have 120, 200 or 250 GB WD Caviars with 8MB cache (I've found that the 2MB cache does actually affect the speed somewhat) and they have found them reliable and fast.

Then again, maxtor are a good brand as well, :)

Steve

So far no negative comments about the IBM drives. That confirms my good feeling about them. Never got an IBM die on me.

8 years ago I was building PC's as a side income, Seagate used to give me heaches, so I taged them as not-so-good drives, and bad sectors (15% at times) were common in in Seagate too at those times also (one out of 8 drivers), but I guess they got better lately.

I got a Gateway PC with a Maxtor 3 years ago, it died after 3 months, after it was replaced I never got a problem though.

To look at the warranty, is definetly a wise advice Chinaman, sometimes I just forget about those things.

All drives fail sooner or later - they're made by us men, and not by God.

That's why I think the warranty is important. Before moving to China I used IBM's in the States. Only had one fail in about a decade. This is the good part - I used their disk utility to run an advanced test, and when it failed, it generated a RMA number and I just stuck in it the box and put the address and RMA # on it and called UPS. Shortly, they delivered me a new drive.

Where I live now, they say they have the least trouble out of Seagate - Maxtor second. They don't really know much about IBM, and like the other poster, we stay away from all Samsung hardware.

A couple weeks ago one of my customers had a drive failure with a Maxtor. Same story as IBM - you can run MaxBlast and if the test fails, it gives you a RMA number. When I tried to fill out the online sheet to send it back, China was not one of the countries listed. So I took it to the distributor here and they returned it for me. Still got a new drive back.

One other detail about the warrantly. Recently some of them changed, and now I think you have to get a retail version to get over one-year warranty. Can't remember.