The IBM 40Mb Deskstar in my server died a couple of weeks ago. Lost a few downloads but that was about it. The next day, my other IBM 40Mb Deskstar in my new Media PC died as well! Arrgghhh!! Must have been lonely. I knew the Deskstars were not very reliabled and it was just a matter of time. They were both four years old. Model IC35L040AVER07-0.
The odd thing was that one had been used a lot often running 24x7 in my server (despite IBM issuing a warning that they should not be run in a server). I wasn't surprised that died. But the other one had spent most of it's time on a shelf.
Time for a fast upgrade! I quickly studied dabs.com, ebuyer.com and storagereview.com before ordering two new drives. I decided to go with Seagate 7200.8 250Gb ATA drives. The motherboard in my server doesn't support SATA and I read a thread suggesting ATA drives were quieter than SATA - SATA drives being optimised for performance. I would have gone with the Samsung SpinPoint drives but their quiet reputation was based on the discontinued P80 series and there were some threads saying the P120 series isn't as quiet. Western Digital has only recently gone with FDB and don't have a reputation for being quiet.
I'm pretty happy with the 7200.8 drives. Idle noise is very, very quiet. Seek noise is audible but not irritating. It looks like 250Gb is the price sweetspot at the moment. They were only £72 each. The price jumps quite a bit if you go over 250Gb.