Mini Article : Hard Drive
Hardrive : Maxtor/Fujitsu/Western Digital/Seagate 8.4 GB
Estimated Cost : PhP 4100
As you may have noticed, I listed most of the harddrive brands. Though not generally accepted by most people, IMHO, no single brand can be said to be better or more reliable than the other. Some people say that Maxtor has the highest number of RMA's ( Return Merchandise Authorization ?? ), believe it or not I have yet to see a Maxtor drive that has actually failed, ironic isn't it? The Maxtor drives that i have used where kind of noisier than your average hard drive, though.
But they are not quite as noisy compared to the older ( > 2 gigs ) Seagates, which sounded like cans being dragged on the street. ( yes, they were that noisy ). Now however, Seagate, the world's largest hard disk drive manufacturer, produces some of the most silent drives. Maybe even approaching the decibel levels of Fujitsu hard drives, by far the quietest ( is there such a word? )drives i have ever used.
Quantum was best known for the speed ( and heat! ) of their Fireball drives and of course for their mammoth 51/4 Bigfoot drives ( which were spinning at less than 5000 RPM ). A Quantum drive i used once had 50 percent of its full capacity plagued with bad sectors yet the drive still kept on functioning. And i know of a Quantum Bigfoot, that survived 4-foot drop and suffered no damaged at all, aside from the large dent on its side!
Note: Nowadays, i tend to favor Seagate Drives ( i avoided them like the plague before because of the horrible sound the older models produced ). Maybe because they : 1) are quiet, 2)have Sea Shield ( protection of the hd's pcb underneath), 3) have "300G Shock" ads placed on newspapers 4) are produced by the largest hard drive manufacturer in this world 5) i got 2 Seagate mouse pads for Christmas. And yet, in spite of all of these reasons, i have just gotten a Maxtor drive!
If you could get a drive backed with 3 years of warranty then you should definitely get one, even if costs a few hundred pesos more. It will be worth it.
More importantly, we move on to the size of the hard drive. Does size really matter? Obviously, it does, everyone knows that: The Bigger the Better. What some people fail to realize is that, the bigger it is, the more expensive it is going to cost. Definitely we need a large drive, but how large is large enough? It all depends on the money your going to spend. If we had infinite resources, we would go for the largest possible drive. However, as with everything ( and everyone ), we need to work within a budget, in this case: a measly 20,000 pesos.
Here is a list of the prices of different sized hard disc drives
