[MacDV] Looking for 200GB Hard drive

[Richard Brown]

The drive to look for is the Maxtor MaxLine, which is in very
short supply in the U.S. The MaxLine is an IDE drive with an
enterprise level background, meaning it will far exceed most
other drives in the 200-320GB arena in terms of reliability.
A huge mean time between failure (MTBF) is stated regarding
the MaxLine products, far in excess of pretty much everything
else in the IDE spectrum.

Short of finding the MaxLine, the Western Digital 200GB
WD2000JB with 8MB buffer is a decent drive. We have
two in a RAID 0 array  in one of our G4's and have seen no problems
as yet. These are relatively new drives, though, so time has
yet to tell its tale. In a RAID 0 configuration, the performance
is very acceptable, 45MB/sec sustained writes, and 65MB/sec
reads.

Keep in mind that drive manufacturers state the size of their
drives based on a megabyte being 1,000,000 bites, or a
Kilobyte 1,000 bytes. This is a cheat, and as Macs generally
think 1024 bytes comprise a Kilobyte,  your Mac will read
the 200GB drive as a 186GB drive. On our WD200GB, using
the cheating formula, the drive has 201GB. A free gig, it
seems. Our array shows 372.62 GB as its capacity with
two of the drives.

Richard Brown


On Friday, January 3, 2003, at 12:32 PM, Thien Tran wrote:

> Hi
> I am looking for a 200Gb Hard drive for my G4/Mac OS X
> Any suggestion? IBM or Western Digital or Maxtor?
>       2Mb or  8Mb buffer.
> Where to find the lowest price ?
>
>  Thank in advance
> Thien
>
>
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