When I first made the switch to Ubuntu over a year ago, I installed it on and older, smaller hard drive. Why? Two simple reasons: it was just a test to see if preferred it over Windows and it was the smallest drive that I had lying around not being used for anything else, so I didn’t have to spend time moving data around, reformatting drives, etc. I was aiming for convenience, not performance, and didn’t want to take up an entire afternoon or evening futzing around with it.

Suffice it to say, the fact that I’ve booted this machine into Windows only once in the past year has shown that this test was a runaway success. But now I have a problem. This older, smaller drive being used as my primary Linux partition is, well, old and small and now, nearly full. It’s a 150 GB Western Digital IDE drive that is either as old as the machine it’s in (a circa 2004 Dell) or from the year before. I probably paid waaay too much for it at the time, but it’s been reliable and I have no complaints apart from how it’s now old and slow. This machine has Maxtor, Western Digital and Seagate (with the original Windows partition) drives in it and all three have given me no trouble. The only problem with the machine is that it too is becoming old and slow, but hey, six years is an eternity as far as desktop hardware goes and it’s held up okay.

I started looking at new drives at Amazon and Newegg and it struck me how useless the online reviews are. Apart from the lower-ranked Seagates, everything is around a 4 out of 5 stars, more or less. Most of the reviews are 4 or 5 star ones stating that yes, the drive worked fine, no problems. The 1 or 2 star reviews are usually screeds about something or other, how it was DOA/RMA/died within a month and so forth. There’s always someone complaining that the transfer rates are too slow or such-and-such benchmarking program gives it only a 83%. Finally, there’s the frustrated loyal user who flips out and says that all the complaints that “ are teh sux0rs” lack the context to determine whether that’s true or not. And out of all of them, that guy is to one closest to the truth. Since I don’t know the conditions involved, I tend to take the rants and raves with a grain of salt and go with brands that have worked in the past. People are also much more likely to report bad experiences than good ones.

It’s like asking people about cell phone plans. Either you get someone who really, really loves his newest cell phone (but still seems to get a new one every six months) or someone who absolutely loathes his carrier – often a combination of the two. The average ends up being “meh.” It works, it probably costs too much per month, but in general, meh, it’s a phone. Meh, it’s a hard drive. You store stuff on it. It works, I guess.