Mine came with a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 (250 GB capacity). These are very highly rated (see review and comparison with Raptor drives at http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=diamondmax10&page=1). Unfortunately mine failed after 1 month of use. The replacement Dell overnighted to me was the identical model. Dell's factory drive image, however, did not work, so I had to do a clean install of XP and all apps -- loads of fun! Also, the Dell Tech Support rep was sufficiently unfamiliar with their new Gen 3 product that he neglected to inform me I would need to first create a floppy in order to load the SATA AHCI (or RAID, depending on your system's configuration) driver at the beginning of the XP install; that little oversight cost me a second evening re-re-installing XP...
Interestingly, when I put in the failed drive as a second drive (to see if there was anything I might be able to recover from it) the system would not even boot from the brand-new replacement boot drive, so I suspect a short on the failed drive's PCB is dragging down the entire bus. But I still have faith in the Maxtor drive design, performance and reliability -- enough so that I just bought and installed an identical one as a second/backup drive.
got me a couple of maxtors-740,s i believe-40gb, and i was having data corruption with em on a certain nforce 2 motherboard, when i moved them to another motherboard, no more data corruption. belive maxtor has a firmware problem with certain models. also read they have certain models that have problems runninig with the serial idie adpaters!
rickmktg
2 Intern
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September 6th, 2004 02:00
It varies based on contracts and availability. Seagate and WD seem top choices lately.
Jet006
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September 6th, 2004 06:00
ronss
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2.1K Posts
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September 6th, 2004 11:00
Message Edited by ronss on 09-06-2004 07:11 AM
Space_Man
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September 6th, 2004 18:00
Mine came with a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 (250 GB capacity). These are very highly rated (see review and comparison with Raptor drives at http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=diamondmax10&page=1). Unfortunately mine failed after 1 month of use. The replacement Dell overnighted to me was the identical model. Dell's factory drive image, however, did not work, so I had to do a clean install of XP and all apps -- loads of fun! Also, the Dell Tech Support rep was sufficiently unfamiliar with their new Gen 3 product that he neglected to inform me I would need to first create a floppy in order to load the SATA AHCI (or RAID, depending on your system's configuration) driver at the beginning of the XP install; that little oversight cost me a second evening re-re-installing XP...
Interestingly, when I put in the failed drive as a second drive (to see if there was anything I might be able to recover from it) the system would not even boot from the brand-new replacement boot drive, so I suspect a short on the failed drive's PCB is dragging down the entire bus. But I still have faith in the Maxtor drive design, performance and reliability -- enough so that I just bought and installed an identical one as a second/backup drive.
ronss
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2.1K Posts
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September 6th, 2004 20:00
Message Edited by ronss on 09-06-2004 04:19 PM