If you're looking for a better hard disk for that thing, I'd suggest going for a Seagate, a Western Digital, or a Samsung. As for IBM/Hitachi, I would avoid them at all costs, as they are some of THE most unreliable drives I've ever used. Every single one I've owned has crashed on me at some point or another. In fact, it's gotten to the point that my friends and I have nicknamed those drives "deathstars" instead of deskstars. 🤣

I would have to say that over 80% of the hard drives I have ever owned have been Seagates and I've been fortunate never to have gotten any of the ones that other people have reported problems with. I have a 1tb Seagate in my current system and it's not one of the ones that suddenly becomes invisible to Windows. I made sure of that before I bought it. 😁

sliderider wrote:

I would have to say that over 80% of the hard drives I have ever owned have been Seagates and I've been fortunate never to have gotten any of the ones that other people have reported problems with. I have a 1tb Seagate in my current system and it's not one of the ones that suddenly becomes invisible to Windows. I made sure of that before I bought it. 😁

Now that's a funny one - I still have two 1Tb Seagates, which after some period of use started to make this irritating "crunching" noise when they were accessed. Back to Seagate they went... 😁

I think it's basically luck of the draw. Every harddrive manufacturer will screw up sooner or later.
Best you can do is do some googling for some older model.
I prefer to use drives that are at least relatively silent. I even use those deathstars because they are fast and relatively silent, even though I know they probably won't last long.

PeteUK wrote:

sliderider wrote:

I would have to say that over 80% of the hard drives I have ever owned have been Seagates and I've been fortunate never to have gotten any of the ones that other people have reported problems with. I have a 1tb Seagate in my current system and it's not one of the ones that suddenly becomes invisible to Windows. I made sure of that before I bought it. 😁

Now that's a funny one - I still have two 1Tb Seagates, which after some period of use started to make this irritating "crunching" noise when they were accessed. Back to Seagate they went... 😁

Earlier model than the one I have. I checked with Seagate and it doesn't fall within the range that was affected by that problem.

I used to work for a hospital with over 1000 pc's across several sites. We used HP compaq desktops, which were using Maxtor drives. At one point we were replacing Maxtor drives every week.

Eventually we got a batch of pc's with WD drives and we rarely had to replace those. I've always been wary of Maxtor since. I've personally owned seagate, WD and samsung drives in the last 10 years and have been lucky enough not to have a failure. Mind you I've got a couple of quantum fireballs that must be around 15 years old and still going strong 😀

WD fanboy here...

Samsung fanboy here actually!

The new Samsungs are fast, silent and cheap! And so far no troubles for me.

Now the funny thing is, I once got a hold on an old 8.4GB Spinpoint (Samsung) and tried it out...it was by FAR the LOUDEST drive I ever tested!
I wanted to put a couple sandbags on top of it SO BADLY...it's a shame the drive still worked perfectly LoL!

I've also used 1 old model WD 250GB and I have to say, used it for 6+ years! And no troubles whatsoever. The problem with the new drives is, it´s hard to figure out what hardware is inside the harddrive by looking at the model numbers. With the Spinpoints it´s real easy figuring out the number of platters, the platter density etc. This is what moved me towards the Spinpoints.

So far I´ve had good experience with most Samsungs, most WD´s and many of the Seagates. The quantums I tried )even the very old ones' tended to still be in working condition, but they are a little too loud for my taste.
Maxtors were either loud or dead, except for that single 60GB one.

WD do colours now.

Black are high performance, blue are good value and green are for media / data.

Full circle in a way... the old WD Caviar AC series all had various colour stripes on them - Don't think they meant anything though... might be wrong?

Tetrium wrote:

The cache on those Celerons is actually 128K 😉

OMG you are right. I don't know how I mixed it up with Duron. I been shamed! Will punish myself later! Will reinstall Vista on a Willamette P4 or something!!!

However, with how caching works on those Intel chips, the Celeron actually only has 96KB total apparently because the L2 duplicates the L1. That means that Duron practically has more total cache! Exciting!

swaaye wrote:

... Will punish myself later! Will reinstall Vista on a Willamette P4 or something!!!

Lol!!

swaaye wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

The cache on those Celerons is actually 128K 😉

OMG you are right. I don't know how I mixed it up with Duron. I been shamed! Will punish myself later! Will reinstall Vista on a Willamette P4 or something!!!

Lol! No need Lol! It's not like I'm never wrong! 😜 😜 😜

I think the early Celerons are basically just as good as P2's.
Even though the later Deschutes has 100Mhz fsb support, imo this matters little for the P2's (but ofcourse, if anyone has a different opinion, please do share!! 😉 ).
The Duron's are pretty good, but there isn't any real reason to pick a Duron over an Athlon (unless it's for SSE or something?).
What I really like about the Coppermines/Tualatins is their much more conservative heat production compared to the Thunderbirds (= early S-A Athlons).

You know, I've always wondered something a little bit:
I know the Duron has 64KB L2, the Athlon (XP) has 256KB and the Barton has 512KB.
I know it's possible to cut/open some bridges so you can enable extra cache on some of the crippled Bartons (the Thortons I think they were called).

BUT...it would also be possible to get a Thoroughbred, and halve it's cache, turning it into some frankenchip, a 128KB L2 "superduron" 😜

Except for retro honor and glory, it would have no point of course...but it's still just...lingering in my head LoL!

OT but roughly how does a Athlon 1200 compare to PIIIs? Any good?

The Athlons were roughly equal to a PIII of the same clockspeed, a little faster in some things, little slower in others, but on the whole an Athlon 1200 is on par with a 1.2ghz Tualatin.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

The Athlons were roughly equal to a PIII of the same clockspeed, a little faster in some things, little slower in others, but on the whole an Athlon 1200 is on par with a 1.2ghz Tualatin.

Thats correct, except for 2 things:
*Thunderbirds have no hardware support for SSE (useful for some things like watching DVD's etc, I believe)
*Tualatins run a LOT cooler then Thunderbirds.

So WD and Seagate are the way to go.

What about Quantum?

These HD's get really hot?

Afaik they run a bit hotter, but realistically, it shouldn't be much of a problem, unless you build the drive in the case in such a way that it has no fresh air whatsoever.

Tetrium wrote:

*Thunderbirds have no hardware support for SSE (useful for some things like watching DVD's etc, I believe)
*Tualatins run a LOT cooler then Thunderbirds.

Actually the original Athlon does have the integer part of SSE. That means that they didn't have the exciting floating point boost. It might have still been useful for DVD decoding though because that's integer oriented.
http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/ISSE

Tualatin is like a 30W CPU whereas TBirds are 50-70W. 😁 Its a good thing that people weren't big on performance per watt comparisons back then or Athlon probably would've had a bit less rosy of a reputation. Remember the noisy fans they used to put on Athlons? We were less picky back then for sure.

Its had its turn in the spray shop! And a 250mb Zip drive has appeared 😁