Hard Drive Brand Debate

[Deucal]

http://www.silentpcreview.com/

check up on their HDD reviews. Very thorough.

Brand isn't everything, almost never is. It is the individual components you have to compare.

[kyanwan]

I too used to purchase Seagate (never had a failed drive from them) but ever since they released those faulty firmwares for their 1 - 1.5 TB drives, I've become wart of buying their drives.

Ah, see, my largest drives so far are my 750 GB Greens, and my largest Seagates are 320s.  I give them a few years to get their firmware figured out before buying things.

Yer never buy the largest sized HDD on the market, I know someone who lost 1.4tb of data cause they bought the 1.5tb hdd as soon as they came out.

Heh - always avoid bleeding-edge tech like the plague.   It's never the best.  

I stick with previous generation, stable tech.   It's usually tried, tested - and kicks ass - not to mention, half price.  

Then if you want 2 tb - get 2 1tb drives.

---

For drives - I swear by Seagate.  I've had Seagates running - sounding like a motorcycle starting up - and I can pull the data off em before I toss em.  They often outlive the warranty of 5 years - no prob.  

More or less - I have grown out of my seagate drives before I tossed them.

Another drive I like - is the Ultrastar/Deskstar - aka - Hitachi.   Good drives too.  Fast, reliable.   These things I retired before they died as well.  

Only brands I've had problems with - old Maxtor , and WDC.

WD - I avoid mostly ... but I do run a couple.   Luckily - they're not bad.

I would say that 90% of the drives I have - are Seagate.  

( We're talking about 20-25 HDs I have running here.   I'm not even sure how many - I got some partitioned. XD )

[teainapot]

The only brand I've had experience with is WD, and I'm very pleased. I first got a 320GB a few years ago, and that thing still works fine after taking a tumble to a hardwood floor. I've also had a 1TB (the larger series) for over a year and it's been fine. I recently got a 'portable' 1TB (from the Essentials SE line) and through some Very Bad Luck it slipped from my loving grip onto a hardwood floor and then was covered in milk.

Yeah...it still works as great as when I pulled it out of the box. The only problem with the portable 1TB is that the cable is very sensitive. You lightly nudge it on accident and this sometimes causes it to disconnect (usually it reconnects shortly afterward, but this can be a problem if you've got torrent files linked to your main PC as I do.)

[boxer4]

I've had all sorts of brands of hard drives and giving my 2 cents:

They all are about the same.  Had all brands fail on me at one time or another, best you can hope for is to keep backups (_and_ RAID if you don't want downtime if it dies mid-flight).

[kureshii]

Hard drives mainly differ in performance, noise and other immediately observable metrics. In terms of failure rate, there may be slight differences between them, but I wouldn't trust any of them to last 7 years. Not to say that can't happen, but I'm not going to keep any important data on a single drive and trust it will keep working for 7 years without failing.

With a RAID (with redundancy, i.e. not RAID 0), the main thing I look out for is warranty period. For cheaper, slower storage, I just buy the cheapest drive with the longest warranty, after checking for other factors like temperature and noise.

[Tiffanys]

I'm a fan of Western Digital. I've always used them and have never had any problems.

When ordering HDD's, always use Fedex, not UPS. UPS tends to be very rough with their packages, so you're going to end up with a lot higher chance of DOA computer equipment.

[mgz]

I'm a fan of Western Digital. I've always used them and have never had any problems.

When ordering HDD's, always use Fedex, not UPS. UPS tends to be very rough with their packages, so you're going to end up with a lot higher chance of DOA computer equipment.

lol fedex is known for more damage claims then UPS.

[fohfoh]

I'm a fan of Western Digital. I've always used them and have never had any problems.

I'm the same. But mainly for laptop HDDs. True, Seagate isn't bad... but it's noisy. Not something I enjoy in a laptop. In a desktop? I could care less. I assume that Seagate has finally ironed out the wrinkles that their little escapade with Maxtor caused.

True, in all seriousness you can pick up any HDD and use it and it's generally fine now. But I still would rather use WD. Dunno, just feels better for me. Not to mention their prices for laptop HDDs were best + had best size selection previously. (I will admit though that I haven't checked prices in a while. 5 bucks difference for a 320GB HDD vs a 160GB HDD from Fujitsu was the selling point for me last year. 115 CAD for the WD vs 110 for the Fujitsu at best buy. I later bought my HDD on newegg.ca for 106CAD and kicked myself when I found it for 98 at NCIX.ca. But that was like... last year January or something.

[Klocknov]

I'm a fan of Western Digital. I've always used them and have never had any problems.

When ordering HDD's, always use Fedex, not UPS. UPS tends to be very rough with their packages, so you're going to end up with a lot higher chance of DOA computer equipment.

A quick hit on that, I will no longer let Fedex touch my computer equipment since the only three orders I have had delivered by them have all had either damaged boxes or broken parts in them and have yet to have a single problem with UPS. So maybe that goes by area you live in since around here UPS is the better for shipping fragile stuff.


Now to HDDs I will start with the old. IDE I couldn't be bothered, only had one drive die out of six, and yes it was a WD. Now I have a 8 year old going on nine Seagate 80gig, a Fujitsu 40gig going on ten years, a 250gig WD that is going on 2 years, and a Maxtor 20 gig that got ripped out of a Dell box that the mobo fried in. (Couldn't tell you how old that Maxtor is... but guessing between 4 and 6 years.) Then I have another one in the closet that is ancient and 8gigs from Seagate.

Now when it comes to buying I shuffle between WD and Seagate depending on what I am buying for. Storage the WDD Greens are great choices and mains I normally choose Seagate. Now past that I have had less luck with WD being as I got a 500gb blue as my main drive and it is dieing slowly in this computer and choose to use my Seagate 1tb as storage. So past that I wish Fujitsu wouldn't have been bought by Toshiba, but maybe Toshiba will start making drives worth my attention. I will admit I have never really gave Hitachi a chance but never really saw anything from them that caught my eye.


And for the dude that brought up Quantum drives that was a bum deal when Maxtor took them over, they made great drives that could take hell.

[Perplexing]

I prefer WD myself however I recently purchased a 1TB Hitachi Deskstar 7200RPM I have been very impressed with this drive.
I previously had a Hitachi HDD for my old laptop and it did fine for me so for the price I decided to try their desktop HDD.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145287&cm_re=hitachi_1tb-_-22-145-287-_-Product

$84.99 for 1TB $149.99 for a 2TB

[Stsin]

I love my WD Caviar Blacks

But I've used many different brands through the years: Quantum, Maxtor, Seagate, and WD.  SCSI and IDE.  From reading about all the failures, I feel fortunate that none of these drives have failed me, before retiring them for upgrades.

You can't compare them by brand only.  Compare by the models, and are still susceptible to bad batches from a factory.  So best to read the reviews on the specific model you want... they are made differently, even by same brand.

For example:  A recent email from Newegg advertised a 2TB Seagate for just over $100 (with coupon).  Nice storage size for the money.  Though I expect good quality from Seagate, the reviews on this particular model are horrid:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148413

Don't go just by brand name.


btw, both UPS and FedEx handle packages roughly.  In case you don't know, they are both on a tight time schedule.

[whiic]

I have no clear preference. I make decision based on models, not brands.

What I have in use:

main rig, internal storage
2000GB WD Caviar Green (5400rpm), 4-platter
2000GB WD Caviar Green (5400rpm), 4-platter
1000GB Samsung F2 Ecogreen (5400rpm), 2-platter
1000GB Samsung F2 Ecogreen (5400rpm), 2-platter
1000GB Samsung F1 Spinpoint (7200rpm), 3-platter

retrofitted to Topfield PVR as HDD upgrade
1000GB Samsung F1 Spinpoint (7200rpm), 3-platter

Old P4 (Prescott) -based computer
120GB Samsung's 5400rpm, 1-platter, laptop HDD (yes, in a desktop case)

Old Duron-based computer
80GB Maxtor DiamondMax +9 (7200rpm), 1-platter

Old P3-based computer
80GB Samsung P80 (7200rpm), 1-platter

Ancient 486/66MHz Compac Presario 520CDS
421MB Quantum ProDrive LPS 420 AT (3600rpm)

There's also some laptop drives used in laptop and 2.5" SATA enclosures
320GB WD Scorpio (5400rpm), 2-platter
320GB WD Scorpio (5400rpm), 2-platter
80GB Toshiba (5400rpm), 1-platter

What I have retired as functional / still using for offline back-up:

in external SATA enclosures
1000GB WD Greenpower (5400rpm), 3-platter (same as Caviar Green, it's name was changed)
1000GB WD Greenpower (5400rpm), 4-platter

in external PATA enclosures
400GB Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 (7200rpm), 5-platter
320GB WD Caviar ("7200rpm"), 3-platter
250GB Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 (7200rpm), 3-platter
250GB Maxtor MaXLine +II (7200rpm), 3-platter

in 2.5" PATA enclosure
12GB IBM Travelstar 12GN (4200rpm), ball-bearings, noisy as hell

lying on the shelf
300GB Maxtor DiamondMax 16 (5400rpm), 4-platter, ball-bearings, whines, half-dead, bad sectors
250GB Seagate Barracuda DB35.3 (7200rpm)
40GB Samsung PL40 (7200rpm), 1-platter, half-dead, bad sectors, SMART warning condition
20GB Seagate U5 (5400rpm), slow as a snail, makes occasional odd screeching noises, ball-bearings but surprizingly quiet for a bb-drive

Then there's some 10GB, 4.3GB Maxtor 5400rpm drives, one Quantum Fireball ST 3.2GB, two Bigfoots (CD-drive sized HDDs!) (BF-series 2.5GB and CY-series 4.3GB), Seagate ST3660A Medalist 545XE (544MB, 3811rpm)... all of which naturally have ball-bearings as they're old. In perfectly functional order (a few bad sectors at most).

The oldest drive I have is a Miniscribe M8051A P4, 41MB, 3484rpm. That's quite a historical model. It was the first drive to have IDE/ATA/PATA (whatever you like to call it) interface. It was also quite a bit ahead of it's time, using voice-actuator coil instead of stepper motor... which from perspective todays perspective is rather shame because voice-actuators are boring... but leaving nostalgic feelings aside, they're just simply so much better that steppers had no chance to prevail.

You cannot get anything older than a Miniscribe M8051A and expect it to work on a modern computer because all older HDDs require RLL or MFM controller... neither of which are NOT available as PCI addon cards (back in the old days, we had ISA bus, and other odd stuff). It's stamped at the factory to have been manufactured JUN 1989 so it'll have it's 21st birthday soon.

Who, sidetracked...
HDDs that I've had to die on me:
200GB WD Caviar (WD2000JB), "7200rpm", 3-platter
300GB Maxtor MaXLine II or DiamondMax 16 (5400rpm), 4-platter (Yes, I have a half-dead one. That was a replacement I got for returning this drive.)
1000GB WD Greenpower (5400rpm), 4-platter

Note: where I've stated "7200rpm" with quatation marks, I'm quoting official specs. It has been know that WD's 7200rpm have sometimes been ~6900rpm in reality. Likewise Caviar Green (=Greenpower) are "5400-7200rpm" but in reality they are all 5400rpm. No variable rpm. (Only Hitachi has variable rpm and it's implementation is hardly as beneficial as you might expect. HDD cannot be accessed in low-rpm mode.)

Not a statistically significant sample size to draw any actual conclusions on reliability. I've had least trouble with Hitachis but they manufacture only 7200rpm drives (=noisy) so I prefer WD and Samsung nowadays (and obviously only their 5400rpm models (Ecogreen, Caviar Green (Greenpower)) and not their 7200rpm models (Spinpoint, Caviar Blue, Caviar Black). Seagates have been bad lately with firmware corruption (=bricking) issues. Issues are probably over already but nevertheless a proof Seagate is not superior to competition. Also their low-rpm drives are 5900rpm and not 5400rpm. They're also noisier.

End TL;DR rant.
Suggestion: refer to www.silentpcreview. com for information of HDDs. After all, noise aspect is probably the most important, and SPCR is the only worthy noise-fixated computer review site.

[PowerMac]

I have had excellent luck with both Seagate and Western Digital. Where I work, they are the only brands we use. I see Hitachi, Fujitsu, and Toshiba drives come in dead everyday and would never recommend them to anyone. Samsung drives seem to be fairly reliable, but I have not had much experience with them.