Does anyone has a recommendation on a >=250GB cool SATA HDD? It's for use in a media server, and performance is not the number one priority.

I've been looking at Samsung SpinPoint P120S 250GB wich is supposed to be cool, but will that be my best choice?

I think both Samsung and Seagate are trustworthy.

Anything but Maxtor...

Yes, you're probably right about Seagate as well. I still have a thorn in my side against them, after four complete crashes in one year. But that was seven years ago and is only emotional from my side. I should have learned. Thanks for the comment!

Why not Maxtor? Do you have a link with furhter information, please?
I bought an external 250GB one 1 year ago, and it's quite nice. Maybe a little hot, but with aluminium casing and standing vertically, I guess it should be okay. It's also quite silent, which is nice.
I read some tests before buying and didn't see any bad thing about Maxtor, except maybe that the temperature too high.

No. Just information from countless friends and forum members that had nothing but tales of woe about Maxtor.

Jan S., rpop, zZzZzZz, Zao, kode54...

We even coined a term, "maxtored". You can probably guess what it means to say some HDD was maxtored...

These days, I don't deal with any brand other than Seagate and Samsung.

To make a concrete question: will a Samsung Spinpoint P120S 7200RPM or Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200RPM be cooler than a Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 SATA2 7200RPM NCQ?

My clients and I have had very good success with Seagate and Western Digital.

Maxtor, IBM/Hitachi, and Quantum fit in the same category for me, not just no, heck no.

I've had an older IBM DJNA for a long time. Not sure about temperature, but loudness, speed and *reliability* was great for its time. I guess i've owned no HDD which survived for so long under constant stress than this IBM DJNA... its now about 7 years old, has almost constantly run 7/24 and was often used for moving large amounts of files.

Quantum - at least those i dealt with until about 4years ago - do run VERY hot and loud... and tend to not have a long lifespan... but they did run very fast(someway, i always got the impression that quantum overtuned their HDDs... running them at higher performance than they should be run).

I as well had bad experience with VERY old seagate HDDs... but that was about 9years ago and has nothing to do with how nowadays HDDs by seagate perform.

Concerning Samsung Spinpoint - i'm running one of them right now, know multiple buddies which own one, and i installed 3 of them in customer PCs..... they are indeed very quiet, run quite cool, and i've heard of no reliability issues yet...... however, it may be too early to draw any reliability-conclusions about this HDD-series.

- Lyx

You can add me to that list.

I've always bought Maxtors over the years. Over the past year one Maxtor 250GB SATA hard drive has failed and the second is currently refusing to open certain folders (I get I/O errors). I plan on going all lossless soon but I won't be buying any more Maxtors for the time being.

on home comp i have 3 x 160 gigs hitachi sata drives, used for video editing (that would count as maximum stres, and they deal with it just fine, no problems with maxtors either.)

old comp. was filled with IBMs, no problems either.

actually the only drive that failed completely (in home enviroment) without warning was a very old 5400 rpm Quantum (after 8 years of constant abuse.)

The issue of temperature is very difficult to straighten out. Performance and reliability is easy. And theese are two different topics. That's why I asked.

No offence to those who have already answered, but please, stay on topic.

I cannot comment on cool HDs itself but I guess you always have the option to install a passive or active HD cooler.

e.g.
http://www.frozen-silicon.de/catalog/detai...09036a6152ca542
http://www.frozen-silicon.de/catalog/detai...09036a6152ca542
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Thanks Digga, I've been looking at HDD coolers, but they will not fit in the box. I'll take a chance with Samsung or Seagate.

Me too!

My first computer ever hard a maxtor hard drive. It died completely over 5 times within 1 year.

I'v been maxtored! But I learn quickly from my mistakes. I never got a maxtor ever again, I currently have 2 seagates.

I've just run PowerMax 4.2 on my two SATA 250GB Maxtors. It turns out both are dying and need to be RMA'd. That's three that have failed on me now, wonderful.

Feel free to add me to the list of maxtored people (luckily I was able to back up everything and return the drive before it managed to eat more than a couple files)