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.