Buying a good HD

[mr.propre]

Time to expand my computer with HD nr.3 because of my strong need for information storage.

And every time I have the same problem, witch brand of HD should I take. What do you think.

Western digital
Seagate
Maxtor

Any help, its a 500G Sata disk ;-)

PS: sorry if this isn't the right forum and sorry for my bad English.

[heartburnkid]

The only brands you should even consider are Western Digital and Seagate. They both give a 5 year warranty, and every other brand gives 1 year. There's a reason for that.

Of the two, I usually get better prices on Western Digital, so I usually go with them.

[regomodo]

Samsung, i've bought 5 and all haven't skipped a beat over the years.

However, i've always had issues with Maxtors and so do people that come into work with knackered pcs

[meanmrmustard]

I used to buy Maxtors and had good luck with them - mostly - but then they went to a one year warranty ( their cust serv told me "everyone " was doing it - yeah right!). Then I found Seagate offering 5 years. Now Maxtor (owned by Seagate now) has 3 on some models (maybe even 5?). I still have a couple old Maxtors running and two WD SATA disks.
Personally I will buy Seagate's from now on.

[mips]

The only brands you should even consider are Western Digital and Seagate.

+1

[blueturtl]

Summing my experience with different brand drives:

Seagate:
- longest life of all HDDs I've tried
- inaudible engine, some barely audible seek noises
- seek speeds could be better, average performance
- 5 year warranty makes me feel safe

Western Digital:
- no lemons for me yet
- drives emit a high pitched wine, but still relatively quiet
- nice performance

Maxtor/Quantum:
- cheap crap
(loads of lemons and the ones that live develop terrible noise issues)
- performance ok

Fujitsu
- no lemons for me
- old drive was quite a winer, don't know about new ones
- best performance I ever got out of an IDE HDD

Hitachi/IBM
- no experience with these

Samsung
- failed after 1 year of use, right after warranty expired
- could have been a lemon
- mediocre in all ways I remember

You should note that Maxtor is now owned by Seagate. Don't buy Seagate drives that go by the old Maxtor labels like DiamondMax etc!

[herbster]

Western Digital is the bomb. I have 5 drives currently, 4 are WD and 1 Seagate. All are quiet, no issues at all so far and very fast (especially the Seagate with 32MB cache vs rest of my WDs with 16).

[Red Shift]

I have two Seagate drives that are 1+ years old. I've read that current Samsung drives are quiet, run cool, and have good read/write performance.

Three or four months ago I read about DRM Western Digital was using or planning to use. I don't know what has become of that or if it was FUD.

[regomodo]

I've read that current Samsung drives are quiet, run cool, and have good read/write performance.

That's true. The WD Caviar 1TB (known for its silence)is just as quiet as all my spinpoints. My 20GB WD is another story however. That's relegated to the box under the stairs away from anybody.

[lespaul_rentals]

Seagate and Western Digital make the best hard drives by far. Seagate has slowly edged ahead for the lead, and right now they have the best prices and best reliability, but Western Digital is great.

[EnergySamus]

I like Western Digital.:):KS:guitar:


EnergySamus

[Paqman]

I've had loads of trouble with Maxtor, I wouldn't touch one with a barge pole now.

[ElijahLynn]

Time to expand my computer with HD nr.3 because of my strong need for information storage.

And every time I have the same problem, witch brand of HD should I take. What do you think.

Western digital
Seagate
Maxtor

Any help, its a 500G Sata disk ;-)

PS: sorry if this isn't the right forum and sorry for my bad English.

With HD's being as cheap as they are now and the possibility of failure the more you buy over your lifetime I think that EVERYONE should have their good stuff on RAID 1.

It is so cheap to have a RAID 1 that all new computers should have it. Hard drives fail... no matter what brand.

I voted WD but I have a raptor that failed not too long ago (it was one of the noisy ones from the beginning)

Get a RAID 1 setup and it really won't matter which brand you buy.

[Paqman]

Get a RAID 1 setup and it really won't matter which brand you buy.

I'm telling all my friends to do this as well. So many people have a lot of personal photos, music, etc stored now. Any hard drive will fail eventually.

You can get reasonably priced RAID1 network storage these days. We put all our data onto the network shares now. I even downsized the HD in my desktop when I upgraded recently because we're not storing anything locally on our PCs now.

As an added bonus, my NAS has a built-in torrent client and only sucks about 11W when left downloading overnight. Nice!

[mr.propre]

I like to thank you all for the response.

Raid 1 isn't an option at this moment, it would not only double my cost, but is also would require an extra raid controller. Maybe in the near future I will do set it up. Anny Ideas on a good raid controller?

For now I will take the WG.

[regomodo]

Raid 1 isn't an option at this moment, it would not only double my cost, but is also would require an extra raid controller. Maybe in the near future I will do set it up. Anny Ideas on a good raid controller?


Well unless you are after LSI megaraid cards and are only using Linux, you don't need a raid controller. Softraid will do

[mr.propre]

The extra HD will be added on my windows vista home premium,
It will be my third HD and I only have 4 sata ports on my mobo.

My linux box get every month fully backuped so no big needs for RAID there.
Edit: and no possibility as my linux box is a laptop :-p

[ksennin]

In the last decade I have seen only five Hard Drive crashes in the contruction company I work at, with a total of maybe twnty different computers. Three were Seagate drives.

In my home computers, Ive had two out of seven drives die. One of the two was a seagate.

Also, I bought last year a 500gb Seagate drive, installed it on a p4-3.0ghz with WinXp, and a week after that, while backing up data, it crashed the system (windows, argh) and my health-monitoring program reported the drive had dropped to 47% health. I have WD drives that have survived freaking catastropohic blackouts intact, yet a restart did this?
Consumer support took about two weeks to reply and they said that they did not pay heed to such monitoring programs. Sigh.

So I rather recomend WDs.

[ericesque]

You are always going to get mixed reviews with HDDs. I know at least a couple dozen people for each brand out there that swear by their brand.

My personal brand at this point is Seagate. They're generally quieter than WD (my second favorite brand) and I've had 1 WD crap out on me. But since there's no conclusive evidence that any brand holds out better, noise and price become my biggest priorities.

[afeasfaerw23231233]

i've only tried three brand of harddisk. seagate, IBM/hitachi deskstar, quantum. the most recent seagate 160G PATA 7200.9 running 24/7 for two years and still work well. it still has 3 year swarranty [total 5 years] i also have a hitachi deskstar 80G working 5 years and still works well.
here's my list of harddisk and their condition:

these are my harddisk and still works well
seagate 160G: 2 years old, 24/7 , works well
IBM deskstar 80G: 5 years old [2 years 24/7], works well
IBM deskstar 30G: 7 years old, normal usage, works well
seagate 1.2G: 12 years old and still works well!
quantum [now defunct] 1.9G: 12 years old and still works well!

here's my harddisk but went bad abnormally:
IBM desktar 80G: spoiled completely after 3 years of normal usage
IBMIB desktar 20G: spoiled completely after 4 years of normal usage

these are given by my relatives but works well:
seagate 20G: 7 years old, normal usage, works well under normal usage
seagate 10G: 8 years old, normal usage, still work well after i accidently drop it on the floor, no bad sector!

here's my harddisk given by my relatives and went bad because of my fault
seagate 4.7G: spoiled by the bad psu
seagate 10G: spoiled by the bad psu
IBM deskstar 20G: i kicked the box while installing os!
seagate 2G: i dropped it on the floor, kick it while it is reading/writing by mistake and further spoiled by a bad psu

here's the disk i received from my relatives have bad sectors still works after re-partitionate them by fbdisk
seagate 20 G, seagate 8.4G, seagate 6.4G , have bad sectors but work well

here's the harddisk of my relatives computers which i built for them but so far no problems reported:
IBM deskstar 40G, 80G x 3, hitachi 120G

personally i won't recommand hitachi deskstar. i once saw an article form the net mention that the IBM deskstar ATA-100 7200rpm series has problem so it sell the deskstar business to hitachi. believe it or not it really happen of my disk.
but at that time i didn't know about it so i bought so many deskstar since i think it was IBM and a bit cheaper than seagate of the same spec [ both provided a 3-yr warranty at that time]. i would recommand seagate.

from my little experience of repairing hardwares, i think that harddisk would seldom go bad with 'normal' usage -- even thought like what i am doing now-- bittorrent 24/7! but be really careful not to shock, shake or kick it when it is running -- especially when it is writing and reading -- it can easily lead to bad sectors. i think temperature may not be a great problem to harddisk [of course too hot is not recommended]. all of my boxes are darn hot -- cpu always up to 70 and mobo up to 55 in summer. i think a bad power supply is the most common reason that cause a harddisk to fail. once you hear abnormal spin-up/down or strange clicking noise from the disk then it may be a psu failure. if you have a multimeter than you can check the 12 v voltage of the psu. if you know how to open the psu then you can try opening it -- swell capacitors are usually the sign of failure.

just for reference.

[Myglaren]

All my drives are Seagate with the current exception of the Toshiba one in the (Toshiba) laptop.

The only one that wasn't was an IBM Deskstar thet died after four months. It's warranty replacement died after 14 months.

I have had a few machines to fix with dead WD and Maxtor drives and hear lots of complaints about them, mailny that they are noisy.

[regomodo]

Just realised i have had other HDD manufacturers die on me. A Toshiba 40GB 2.5" (stopped spinning) and a 10GB Quantum(who?) that spins but the armature is dead.