Favored SATA drive?

[Chromefree]

Hi Guys,

In your most revered opinions, what is the most reliable internal SATA drive to use with Pro Tools 8?

I just don't want to buy any lemons.

Thanks,

Pete

[albee1952]

My 2 cents here. I will buy any major brand but I avoid any drive that has the word "GREEN" on the box or in the description. Anything that calls itself green, likely has some kind of power saving features that would be a big minus for use with any DAW system. I have WD, Maxtor and Seagate drives and have been happy with all of them. I stay away from the Hitachi drives due to a major problem with their IBM branded drives from a few years back. They may well be just fine these days. External drives are another thing but that's my take on internals.

[chrisdee]

The faster the better. The Raptor disks with 10 000 RPM should do the job.

[NeveSSL]

10k RPM drives will definitely do the job, but not much better than 7200RPM drives and are much, MUCH more expensive. IE, I wouldn't worry about 10k RPM drives. 7200RPM drives do great unless you'll be doing massive projects.

I personally consider all of the major brands to be fine (including Hitachi) and even if something does go wrong, they all seem to have good customer service and will get you taken care of. That being said, I do generally lean toward Seagate or lately WD. WD back in the day were HORRIBLE (circa 2000), but have since cleaned up their act tremendously and may be one of the best out there at the moment.

Dependibility varies between models as well as makes, so check out the reviews of the one you're considering purchasing before you do. Newegg.com is a great resource as well as a great company to purchase through.

Brandon

[Shifted Music]

speed wise... thhe raptor drive is great...

I guess you will notice a bit if you work fast... if you know Pro Tools well and move quick the faster drive will be able to keep up.

for the last 4 years I had a raptor on my LE system at home and a 7200 seagate at the studio on my hd rig and I always felt a little stutter on the 7200 drive.

I have used 10K drive for many years in the scuzzi world then the 15K scuzzies then the 10 k raptors so I am very used to the feel and response of fast drives... the almost instantanious playback start on a raptor is really nice. . like I said if you work fast. and even more so if your sessions are large.

Either one will get the job done. and if your used to 7200's and they don't seem to lag on you then you should be fine. . unless you plan on doing larger sessions in the future...

[sunburst79]

Lately WD would be the 1st choice.

In the last year Seagate has has some issues with bad firmware leading to the drives parking the heads on boot up due to a false detection of a SMART error. This was mainly confined to the 7200.11 series 1 and 1.5TB drives. All in all the 7200.11 series had some issues. While I haven't had any data loss I did have a couple of brand new 7200.11 320GB that wouldn't stay initialised and a 750 Gb that needed new firmware flashed. The latest 7200.12 series seems to be getting pretty roundly hammered in neweggs reviews. I would like to note that I buy a lot of stuff from Newegg but the last 10 drives have shown up with the drives simply floating in a sea of peanuts and had worked their way completely out of the packaging material. All off the Seagates I have bought locally have been flawless. Microcenter picked up a lot off buisness from me last year becuase of Neweggs poor packaging.

The Hitachi and their siblings the Samsung drives are both the evolutionary descendants of the ill fated IBM Deskstar AKA "Deathstar" drives. About a year ago they had a firmware issue that had with some of the P35 Chipsets requiring them to be jumpered down from SATA 3.0 to SATA 1.5 mode. This seemed to be mostly confined to Gigabyte boards for some reasen. Good drive for a desktop of Media Center PC they wouldn't be my first choice for a DAW.

Given Seagates recent issues I would recommend the WD Black series as a first choice.

Thats the morning drive report.

[albee1952]

"Thats the morning drive report." NICE!
In any case, no matter what brand you choose, have a backup plan. I had 2 drive failures with drives that were only weeks old, so copy everything to more than one drive(if its important). I lost a huge session on a 2 week old drive, and it was my first big project. On the good side, it was also my first experiment with backing up a session to DVD-R and the backup worked! yay

[M-ManLA]

I go with Western Digital. I tried Seagate and Maxtor, and WD seems like it is more stable and better performing in the latter two. My next rig I am planning to add a WD VelociRaptor 300GB, and WD Black 1TB. That is personal choice though. All brands have their pluses and minuses.