Most reliable hard drive brand - need suggestions

[Paqman]

Asking which is the most reliable hard drive brand is a bit like asking which is the most child-safe chainsaw. None of the traditional spinning drives are particularly reliable IMO.

Just get any of the decent brands and have proper redundancy and backups. The security of your data comes more from active steps you take to protect it than it does from the reliability (or otherwise) of twirling drives.

[LowSky]

Asking which is the most reliable hard drive brand is a bit like asking which is the most child-safe chainsaw. None of the traditional spinning drives are particularly reliable IMO.

Ye of little faith. I still have a old WD raptor (74gig model) still kicking!


I have no issue with any manufacturer. I have used them all. I had one failure and it was my fault because I left the chip side down flat against my PC's casing and it overheated and shorted out.

My best advice is pick drives at the lowest cost you can find one. If you can buy it in retail packaging only because OEM sold drives can sometimes arrive not so well wrapped. In the latter case blame the seller not the drive. For instance a few online sellers at one time were selling OEM drives with poor packaging and not labeling the packages fragile. Just guess what happens when you express mail a drive and it isn't packed right. The larger the drive capacity the higher rate of failure due to poor shipping and handling.

I usually pick Western Digital. They usually have a 5 year warranty, not that I ever tried to call them on it. But I like the reassurance.

[Grenage]

I'm looking at buying a 2TB drive but have no idea what is the current decent brand. I was looking at the Western Digital Cavier Green 2TB drive. Are they any good? How about Samsung's Spinpoint?

I usually buy Seagate but they are more expensive than the WD drive.

EDIT: Just realised that the Cavier Green drive is running at 5400 rpm. That would mean the price difference doesn't matter since the 7200 rpm drives are the ones I'm looking to buy. So now it's entirely about reliability.

I have Seagate/Samsung/WD green drives in my media centre at home; they all run just fine, and I have had no complaints.

At work, the failure rate seems reasonably even across the board. Due to the nature of the things, reliability is mostly pot luck - any of them could last a day, or they could last 10 years. One can't claim Seagate to be the best, simply because a handful of people have 11yr drives still running fine. Equally, one can't claim that Samsung drives are unreliable simply because they had three fail on the trot.

[eldergeek]

As has been said, WD and Seagate are both good. I like to search newegg and sort by best rating. Then, if I can afford it, I go with the whichever (of the item I'm seeking) has the highest rating by the largest number of people, even if I buy it somewhere else (which happens once in a long while), newegg's ratings help me decide which model I want.

[Paqman]

any of them could last a day, or they could last 10 years. One can't claim Seagate to be the best, simply because a handful of people have 11yr drives still running fine. Equally, one can't claim that Samsung drives are unreliable simply because they had three fail on the trot.

^This.

Any one person's sample size is going to be too small to say anything meaningful about reliability. The probability of failure is highest when the drive is either very new or very old, but should otherwise be considered random. Get whatever one has the price/performance you require and plan for failure.

[Lucradia]

According to newegg and whatnot, all brands of harddrives are un-reliable about 70-80% of the time, the same with wireless routers.

[Evil-Ernie]

For out and out reliabilty you need to look at SSDs. SSDs are 50% more resistant to knocks and vibration because of no moving parts, mean time between failures for SSD is 1.2 million hours to HDDs 600K hours blah blah blah.

Id have to say Intels SSDs are ace, Im using one now!

[flemur13013]

This is worth reading:

Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population

Our key findings are:

• Contrary to previously reported results, we found very little correlation between failure rates and either elevated temperature or activity levels.
  
• Some SMART parameters (scan errors, reallocation counts, offline reallocation counts, and probational counts) have a large impact on failure probability.
  
• Given the lack of occurrence of predictive SMART signals on a large fraction of failed drives, it is unlikely that an accurate predictive failure model can be built based on these signals alone.

[spikeh]

It's impossible to ascertain which brand has "the best reliability" from anecdotal evidence.

Take note of warranty when you buy drives, especially OEM from online etailers. I've had Seagate honour their warranty on a 4 year old drive that had 5 year warranty, though the replacement was "Certified Repaired" and not an original.

[forrestcupp]

I always liked the Commodore 1581 hard disk drives.