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Originally Posted by Dean
It is funny how drive manufaturers eb and flow. Back in the days of 45 MEGABYTE hard drives, Seagate was just short of going under due to some huge QA & design issues. Quantum was the ruler then for some time. Then WD took over the Desktop world, followed by IBM, and then Maxtor came out of nowhere and swallowed up Quantum. Now it is kind of a crap shoot.
Seagate owns the SCSI world for the most part, though Fujitsu and recently Maxtor/Quantum is getting back in the game. WD embraced SATA first, and holds a commanding lead in performance SATA. Maxtor largely owns the retail consumer market. Hitachi, formerly IBM is making a run at them though.
All this says it is still a very competitive market where we all win. I remember paying about $500 for a used 5 MB 5.25 full height external hard drive for my Apple II+ about 25 or so odd years ago... Man I'm old...
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I'm not sure how true all this is still, but just a few months ago, I believe that Seagate was one of the few manufacturers that were building true SATA drives... the rest were all ATA drives with a SATA bridge. The difference being, those bridged drives can't pipeline commands like a true SATA drive can (providing you have the proper SATA controller... most don't pipeline yet... at least none of the onboard SATA controllers for the MB's I was looking at 2 months ago).
The real performance benefits from SATA don't come through bandwidth, they come from the interface being allowed to re-organize commands for efficiency. While this won't make huge gains on your everyday machine, it will *rock* on file and web servers, and make SATA a true contender for usurping SCSI.
And back on Seagate... the nice thing about them is that a lot of the high-end SCSI design makes it into their S/ATA drives as well. The ATA Barracuda IV had all the same liquid damped ball bearing what's-it-magiggers in there... plus if you got the 40GB single platter drive, it was damn near silent and vibration free. Lots of recording studio guys would use those in their gear because of how quiet they were. The successors, the Barracuda V and 7200.7 aren't quite as quiet, but they're close, and available in much larger sizes.
And I too remember a day when it was WD or you were a retard. Back in the 6.4GB era, they couldn't be beat, and their warranty lasted forever. I think I've had 8 or 9 of those drives, and they all had uptime in years. 'Course today, I wouldn't put a WD drive in my mom's computer.