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Written By Ian Hoppe

Seagate hard drives are some of the best and most reliable high end drives on the market. Because of this though, they can become a little pricey. These drives come in a very large range of capacities, 4 gigabytes to 50 gigabytes. The transfer rates and seek times do not change too much between different sizes, a Barracuda 50 and a Barracuda 8 transfer at about the same speeds. The average user will most likely find no need for these blazing speeds. They are intended mainly for high end workstations and high performance servers that support 100+ users. If quality and dependability is what you are seeking and money is not an issue than these are the drives for you. Keep in mind that these are all SCSI drives, which means that you are going to need a SCSI card.

Western Digital makes hard drives for the average user. Most of the drives do not require extra equipment or peripherals, and still perform remarkably well. I am running a Caviar 6.4g hard drive in my own machine and have been very pleased with it. These hard drives come with many features that every user will find very helpful. First, WD is the first manufacturer to offer Ultra ATA/66 which doubles the transfer speed from 33.3mb/s to 66.6mb/s. Next is the Data Lifeguard which detects and corrects possible errors on the disk that result from extended use of the hard drive.WD drives consume very little energy as well, saving money and the environment. If this wasn't enough for you, every Caviar hard drive comes with a 3 year warranty.

Maxtor provides hard drives at a relatively cheap price, compared to other manufacturers. I do not have any personal experience with these drives and have not heard many things about them. From looking at their data sheets, they have relatively slow data transfers, which means that when running programs and opening and saving files there could be a lot of lag. This may explain their cheaper price. Their seek time is not bad for an EIDE drive. Maxtor claims to have "outstanding No Quibble Service with technical service available via telephone, Email, World Wide Web and 24 hour automated services."

Yeah, the names of these drives are pretty lame, but what are you gonna do. Quantum has the full spectrum of products, they have high end high performance drives and then they have some of the slowest drives that I have seen thus yet. I guess they can sell those a lot cheaper, but the high end drives are quite expensive. The Atlas 10k looks pretty impressive if I do say so myself, that has to be one of the fastest seek time averages, and that is 36.4 GB of data. Overall, these hard drives are either good or bad, you can go both ways. If I had to draw the line, I would probably say that the Fireballs are about as low as I would go. If you don't want to spend that much money and don't care about performance than the Bigfoots would be right up your alley.

IBM in many ways is just like Quantum, they produce some very nice drives and they produce some budget drives. Their SCSI drives have fairly good seek times and platter speeds, but the IDE drives have incredibly slow ones. Overall IBM's drives are fairly inexpensive, but somewhat unreliable. They are prone to crashing and leaving you stranded.