Read about memory requirement. The same goes for disk storage.
However, disk storage has another concern. When memory fails systems tend to crash in short order (hopefully) and that is it. When a disk drive fails, a large amount of your valuable data is located on it. I find that the best disk drive is one that gives
find that SCSI disk drives, even lower quality ones, more easily meet the above criteria than other drive media, such as IDE/ATA disks. The SCSI disks have a long lifetime. They give plent of signs that things are failing. Even a failed drive can often be resurrected and brought online for long enough to extract data.
I find that ATA/IDE disks tend to have a shorter life span. When they fail there is almost no warning. Typically it goes from the drive making funny noises to the drive will never work again in only a space of a few hours or even minutes. Do SCSI disks fail? Of course they do! They tend to fail soft instead of just dying for forever.
Another way of saying it is that I prefer SCSI class disks because they give me peace of mind. Do I not have any IDE disks? No, of course not, they are cheap and they hold a tremendous amount of data. At the same time I use them in "disposable" systems where the loss of the data or the failure of the drive will not inconvenience me terribly.
Some of the newer "server class" SATA disks are starting to approach the performance of slower older SCSI disks. They are also starting to add some SCSI features (Tagged Queueing and async modes for example) to SATA devices. Only 15-20 years behind SCSI!
IBM had a fine disk division. They make great disks, reliable, run cool, etc. So of course they sold it to someone else. About the only scar on the IBM disk family was the infamous DeskStar failure, where a whole batch of production line of disks went bad. Some people have soured on them due to that, but their products before and after are rock solid. Hitachi (HDS) often is the first manufacturer with a new disk technology or storage capacity.
Seagate makes good solid disks. I find the IBM disks are often more quiet and cooler running. The Seagate disks are built like tanks.
The only problem I've had with Seagate drives are their external USB drives. The case firmware times out disk accesses when it is waiting for the drive to spin back up. This causes OSes to think the drive has died, and results in file system errors and corruption. There is a firmware tool [XXX find link] to let you adjust the sleep inactivity timeouts, including no timeout. However, the problem still occurrs even if the drive doesn't go to sleep. Hopefully Seagate will continue fixing these problems to produce some high quality storage.
Quantum and Maxtor were seperate companies. Maxtor originally produced some darn good disks, then fell into the consumer market. Quantum was making some fine upper end disks, as well as some consumer items. Maxtor bought out Quantum to get their higher end storage products, such as the Atlas disk. Then, end the end, Maxtor was purchased by Seagate.
Somewhere in there, one of the three companies brought out the Connor disk company too.
Lots of companies ship with Western Digital hard drives. I don't know why. Cost perhaps? Energy Use? and performance. That being said, they have worked fine in my Apple PowerMacs for the last couple of years. However, in prior experience with a large fleet of disks, the WDs tended to fail on a depressingly regular basis.
Fujitsu Eagle. Now >that> is a disk! Big honking SMD disks sitting in 19 inch racks and dead solid reliable for longer than I care to remember. The Fuji Eagles were the disks everyone had on Vaxes and other mini computers of the age.
As the disk market shrunk (in device size) Fuji kept up, and made some great 3.5" Devices as well. Then they faded from the market. Which is strange, considering the effort they put into their disk division. As of 2008, they seem to have made a resurgence with some new technology. Perhaps Fujitsu will return to the ranks of 1st class storage.
Oh, by-they-way, that is just my version of what Fuji has been doing. They may have been selling disks for years in secondary markets, such as to server and storage manufacturers. I just don't see any of their disks in any computers I've used in the last 15 years or so (as of 2008).
The LaCie drives are nicely done. They use a metal case with lots of cooling -- these things are always cool to the touch. The use a quality high throughput Oxford Bridge so you get good data rates and high reliability. Their firmware is excellent, there is no problems with boots, or sleeping drives.
The LaCie SilverKeeper backup software isn't too bad. It works, though there are some problems with access time on symlinks in older versions, which causes the symlink in he destination to be removed if you tell it to bring things in-line with the source.