Reasonable Prices?

Bjarni Herjolfsson · Post by **Bjarni Herjolfsson** » Sat Jul 26, 2003 1:20 pm

My dad runs a small office and needs to back some important stuff up. He wants to know if the items and their prices are good. Please rate price and quality on a scale of 1-5. 5 being the best. If they all suck, please suggest a better place.

Veritas Backup Exec 9.0 for Windows Servers $549
HP Surestore Dat24i Backup drive $849
Adaptec SCSI Adapter $65
Raid Controller $99
40 GB Western Digital HD $75

Each item should have two seperate ratings for price and quality.

Thank you.

Post by **Martin Blank** » Sat Jul 26, 2003 5:25 pm

[quote="Bjarni Herjolfsson";p="122152"]Veritas Backup Exec 9.0 for Windows Servers $549[/quote]
Quality: 5 -- I love Veritas for being stable, reliable, and full-featured. There are other backup packages like ARCServe, but I haven't used that in a few years and didn't care for it at the time.

Price: 3 -- Looks like list price. Look through PriceGrabber, and you can find it for about $450 shipped.

HP Surestore Dat24i Backup drive $849

Can't comment -- haven't used it.

Adaptec SCSI Adapter $65

Quality: 5 -- Adaptec is the best SCSI card manufacturer there is. Make sure it's reasonably recent, and you'll be fine.

Price: ? -- Dunno. Depends on the exact model you're getting.

Raid Controller $99

Can't comment -- there are so many RAID controllers out there, and there's no information here. Is he going to be mirroring or running RAID-5? Or perhaps striped/mirrored sets? Does he have a particular brand of server?

40 GB Western Digital HD $75

Quality: 4 -- I give them the benefit of the doubt now, since I know of some people who have been running them without problems. I also know of one who had three of them fail in the course of three weeks. YMMV.

Price: 3 -- Average price, but not bad.

Bjarni Herjolfsson · Post by **Bjarni Herjolfsson** » Sat Jul 26, 2003 11:39 pm

thanks alot man

Teranfirbt · Post by **Teranfirbt** » Mon Jul 28, 2003 7:00 am

Hmmmm, I love WD hard drives, ive never had one die.... and I've put em in about 10 different computers with various sizes... but thats my experience... MB has obviously had a lot more...

Post by **Martin Blank** » Mon Jul 28, 2003 1:59 pm

I've had three of them die on me or on close friends in the course of about four years, plus one of those friends knows of more than a half-dozen that died, and WD has had repeated problems in the past with their drives, including batches with failure rates "as high as 50%." (Source: Wired News, Feb 14, 1997)

In addition, there was a promising computer manufacturer, based in Britain IIRC, that had a large batch of bad drives delivered to them with a massive failure rate that was so bad that it killed the company's reputation and drove it into the ground. WD settled the case years later, admitting no fault but coughing up a sizable settlement, though most of it went to remaining creditors who held on through the years of court proceedings. I just wish I could find an article on it.

Infin8Cyn · Post by **Infin8Cyn** » Mon Jul 28, 2003 3:26 pm

in the last 7years I've lost 5 WD Drives. I'm no longer a fan of WD. I choose Maxtor above all else. They're Nice drives, well the 100gb & 120gb versions at least...

Post by **Martin Blank** » Mon Jul 28, 2003 3:37 pm

Amen, brutha. I have two 60GB drives in a mirror as my main drive, and a 200GB, 8MB buffer drive for downloads, test stuff, and so forth. They use the fluid-bearing-drive which is almost completely silent. Love it.

Bjarni Herjolfsson · Post by **Bjarni Herjolfsson** » Thu Jul 31, 2003 12:14 am

so is this a good or bad thing for the one I'm getting?

Infin8Cyn · Post by **Infin8Cyn** » Thu Jul 31, 2003 12:18 am

I'd kill for the 200gb Maxtor. As for a raid array. I need one. I've got 225gb of data ATM waiting to crap on me. Bah.. 85gb of mp3's. think the RIAA would like me?

Bjarni Herjolfsson, It's your own call. I avoid them for my own good reasons, maybe you'll have better luck, but my experience with WD drives was good at first, until they dropped like flies.

V'Lyandra · Post by **V'Lyandra** » Thu Jul 31, 2003 3:14 am

I've never had a problem with WDs. I love them. It was a Maxtor that died on me. So, there's really no guarantee for either brand....

Post by **Martin Blank** » Thu Jul 31, 2003 2:18 pm

Any drive can fail; I've actually had two Maxtors fail on me, but the pain was lessened (almost eliminated) by the fact that I had a RAID-1 array. Their painless cross-shipping worked beautifully -- enter my credit card (in case I don't return the other drive), they ship me a drive via Fed-Ex, I install, and ship back the dead drive within 30 days. All website, no calls, and the website asked only for model and serial numbers, and a basic point on the problem with the drive. Much better than IBM's method of calls and questions.

Fixer · Post by **Fixer** » Thu Jul 31, 2003 4:16 pm

The only WD drives I've had fail were due to problems in the power supply (ocassional spike to the HDs, hard as hell to pin down, but I found it using an oscilliscope). WD are a bit touchy about electricity, but really stable physically. Can't speak for Maxtor, only used one and that was a LONG time ago.

Teranfirbt · Post by **Teranfirbt** » Fri Aug 01, 2003 1:43 am

The worst drives ive found are samsung drives. ive worked on over 15 computer that had samsung drives where the drives were dead.

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