New 2nd hard drive

[grober]

I have been contemplating buying a second internal hard drive for my PC Dell Dimension 4700 series. Present drive is a Seagate BARRACUDA 7200.7 160 Gbyte SATA 7,200 RPM 8Mbyte cache. I am looking for a second drive of about double the capacity-something like this sort of spec

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320 Gbytes 3.5" SATA-300 7200rpm 16MB buffer

I have trawled the net looking at reviews but get lots of conflicting info. My main concern is reliability+quiet/cool running rather than outright performance.

I have narrowed the field down to Western Digital or Seagate models but would be grateful for any comments on the relative reliability of any 320Gbyte SATA drives ---Hitachi, Maxtor,Samsung etc plus the above 2.

Seagate seem to offer a better warranty and back up but you can never tell till things go wrong and by then its too late of course.

All comments welcome.

 

[dickchailey]

I look after a school network with about 100 PC's and 3 servers. Most of the HD failures are at 4-5 years and no make seems better than another. Machines supplied with SATA drives have not failed yet. I have found some PC's have the SATA-150 jumper installed on the HD even though the board and HD are rated 300. No idea why.
If you are not using RAID buy two and mirror on to the second in situ or via a USB box. Shame to loose all that data!
Good luck