[Rob.Screene]

Just got this offer email today:

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...=36369&_LOC=UK

£59.99+VAT. dabs.com want £62.98+VAT.

I'm looking for a new HTPC hard disc myself and this looks to be a good price for a quiet, large hard disk, ideal for HTPC's, although I've not bought from ebuyer before. I wonder it I'd kick myself for getting 80GB and not 120GB as the 50% extra space doesn't cost much at the moment...

ebuyer also have :-
Seagate ST3120023A 120Gb 7200rpm UDMA100 9.4ms 2mb Cache - OEM £84.84+VAT. dabs want £85.11+VAT.

IBM / Hitachi 180GXP 120GB 7200rpm ATA100 2mb Cache Hard Drive - OEM £73.09 +VAT. dabs.com want £75.75+VAT

The 180GXP is reported to be almost as silent as the Barracuda's and faster, although this won't really give much benefit in most HTPC's, it is cheap for 120GB. i.e. 20GB Allowing 200 albums of MP3's at 256KBps + 15 ripped full DVD's, the 80GB one would only give space for about 9! This is great for timeshifting rental or lent DVD's when you want to return them, but haven't found time to watch them yet.

Q: anybody compare the noise and heat of a 180GXP to a Seagate Barracuda?

cheers,
Rob.

One thing to bear in mind is that the offer is from ebuyer - I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole

www.ebuyerdotcon.co.uk

For some reason I used them for 4 orders (not small amounts of kit nor cash either), but they only managed to do one correctly.

Then taken me 4 months to get a refund off them, had to call twice a day every day hassling them

[MuFu]

Weird, I've ordered over 15k's worth of stuff from Ebuyer and only ever had one problem when they shipped an incorrect mobo. They managed to send me the correct one overnight on a Friday evening and completely covered the two-way postage costs, taking the incorrect one back on good faith in my own time!

I'd say they are actually one of the better companies as far as customer service goes.

MuFu.

[Iain Shields]

IBM/Hitachi HD drives have a bad reputation for relyability...

[Thrash]

I have also used Ebuyer almost exclusively for the last 18 months and like all companies of their type they can have problems. However 95% of the time everything has been fine and they are usually the cheapest for components. I used to use DABS a lot but had about equal customer service with them as I did with Ebuyer, so now use Ebuyer for most of my purchases.

[Loafer316]

Please don't get an IBM drive!! i'm on my third RMA'd drive....gonna get a seagate next...

komplett also have the 80gb seagate but that is stated as the new 7200.7 model or something and has a faster seek time....i think it's around £72...but they also have the barracuda V....anyone know the difference??

[Rob.Screene]

Thanks for the warning loafer316.

I've just got a replacement IBM 75GXP back from Hitachi customer services, so I know about the infamous IBM drive problems.

Mind you I also have a dead Maxtor and a dead Western Digital drive somwhere!

Apparently the 180GXP drives are very reliable and incompable to the 75GXP line that I and many, many others have had bad sectors and clicking on.

From what I've read, I'd happily put a 180GXP in a HTPC. forums.theoverclockingstore.com I think was a good place to find more about this sort of issue.

regards,
Rob.

Wow - you chaps are very lucky with ebuyer !!

what's your secret ??!!?

[chachi]

Played around a bit trying IBM, Seagate, Hitachi and various Maxtor drives before settling on the below:

My HTPC:

AOpen AK77-8X-MAX w/1GB DDR
ATI Radeon All In Wonder 8500DV w/ All In Wonder IR Remote
2x WD 180GB 8mb cache drives (3yr warranty "J" series)
NEC D1000A DVD+R/+RW
Panasonic LF-D310 DVD-RAM/-R
LG 52x CDRW

Super silent case fan and CPU fan, one cannot tell the PC is sitting there and running except the lights are on and occasionally blinking.

PC is coaxial digital fed into our Rotel stack for amplification and SVideo fed to our 36" Hitachi WS .... does a nice job at serving MP3s, DivX, etc and the AIW Remote is *QUITE* nice as a generic wireless mouse for file/app selection from the sofa

[MonkeyDonkey]

Originally posted by Rob.Screene

Apparently the 180GXP drives are very reliable

They said that about the 60GXP's too until they all started failing.

[pingtuk]

I used Ebuyer last month and they were great. No problems at all.

[JohnS]

I've used ebuyer about a dozen times in the last year and all have been okay. On one occaision I had to return a ADSL router which was in the ADSL modem section of their site and got a refund including postage with no problem at all.

[DownToTheBone]

I've had IBM drives for the past 2-3 years and never had a problem 75GXP then the 180GXP ...

DTTB