my oldest drive would be a 12year old 80GB WD drive =p currently being used as a paper weight since its a 5400rpm drive that has no use as a storage device since it has such a tiny capacity while being bulky and all.
?
I'm still actually using an 80gb drive. It's not a lot, but if it works, it's not a big deal. Other than that, I have a 40gb (IIRC) in one of my computers (not in use). The smallest I've had was 8GB. I think we threw away that computer a good while ago though. It's not like I could have used that thing for anything more than like 2 anime seasons though.
I also still use a 16 MB flash drive.
Anyhow:
The oldest components in my PC are a pair of 160gig seagates, well over 6 years old now. I've had a Samsung and a Western Digital die on me in the mean time. I guess my real point is, it's all just dumb luck in the end.
To say it's all dumb luck is false.
Just read this paper.Summarized version (go to the comment with ~37 upvotes)The only real beef I have with what he says in the summary is that the manufacturer doesn't matter. Although google didn't focus on it, quoting the study on page 4:
Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes significantly when we normalize failure rates per each drive model.Combine this with
the study talked about here. The study basically says that
who you buy it from matters!. You buy shitty drives, you get a higher chance of failures across the board. It's that simple.
So how do you weed bad drives out? Newegg has a very useful thing, it's called
reviews. What I do is I take the reviews and list them by lowest rating first, and then I see how long the drive lasted for them. If you just have that rough patch of 1 egg votes in the 3-6 month period, that's fine. But if you have a lot of them that are failing right around one year to two years,
that tells you it's a shitty drive and you shouldn't buy it. That's not the only thing you should be looking out for, but it's probably a major one.
That's how I made up my mind when I purchased my 1.5TB and 2TB Samsung drives, and guess what?
They're still working now, years later. Another important thing to note, though, is that I mostly use them for archiving anime and watching anime (and some occasional music). So, I generally don't play games on them. They're not under terribly heavy use (though I recently copied my entire anime and ga--... I mean stuff... collection over to my friend for him to watch, which was a pretty heavy process). Like the study says, how you plan to use the drives, and what conditions you use them under matters, too.
And no,
I'm not going to say that some of it isn't just pure luck. These drives are mechanical, that's always a factor. But to say that who you choose to go with doesn't matter is just stupid. You do more research, you get a lower
probability of failure. It's simple.
As for the original topic post, since there probably currently isn't enough information about manufacturing changes regarding the new Seagate/Samsung hybrid drives (thus a lack of reviews about the new drives, too), I would
hold off on them. If you can find something reliable, at comparable price, and they'll let you take the drive back for a full refund... then do it. If not... well, you'll just have to either take the plunge or decide on an alternative.
... Okay now that took way too much research. I was just interested myself, so that's why I did it. >_>
