On Thu, 2011-06-02 at 15:02 +0100, Oli Glaser wrote: > Hi All, >=20 > I have a sneaky feeling that my hard drive will be an ex hard drive=20 > soon, so I am going to pre-empt disaster and but a new one now. > My current one is a 5400 rpm SATA 2.5" 160GB drive by Toshiba: > http://bit.ly/iJMH2q=20 > >=20 > The one I am considering (or something like it) is a 7200rpm 250GB one: > http://bit.ly/jH5n6c >=20 > I don't care too much about cost or capacity - my main concern is with=20 > raw speed and reliability. It will be on 24/7 like this one has been for= =20 > the last 2 years and used constantly. > So, any advice? Who make the best drives nowadays? > I will (probably) be buying in the next hour or so (would like it=20 > tomorrow if possible) so some quick thoughts > would be great. If cost truely doesn't matter, get an Intel SSD, they will BLOW any platter based drive out of the water, and reliability is very good so far. Otherwise, for platter based drives: For reliability: Every manu has thousands of customers who claim their drives are the worst, and thousands they are the best. Fact is, what's "the best" changes ever so slightly with every new model and rev introduced.=20 Personally, I don't even really look at manu anymore, I just assume they will all fail some day, and plan accordingly. For performance: There are tons of sites that benchmark these things, have a look at tomshardware.com and anandtech.com, they both regularly do benchmarking suites on a variety of drives. --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .