Which hard disk manufacturer?

[localzuk]

So my home PC's main hard disk has just packed up after the long life of 6 months - but I'm not surprised, as it is a Maxtor...

What manufacturers do people prefer for their hard disks?

[Simcfc73]

Home Western Digital or Spinpoint ones.

Work, the cheapest every time but not keen on Maxtor as I've had alot fail but thats probably because I inherited alot.

[webman]

I've always bought Seagate. Out of the 30+ disks I've ever bought from them only one has failed.

[Norphy]

Seagate. Five year warranty on all of their bare drives. Can't argue with that

[FN-GM]

Always Seagate

Z

[nicholab]

Hi well I would normally either go with Seagete or WD but Samasung's new 320GB per platter design looks good (1TB on 3 platters).

[localzuk]

So people know my preference, I'd say WD when I have the choice (ie, when the machine isn't made where every component is chosen on a budget). I've not had many Seagate disks, but the fact they make Maxtor disks now doesn't fill me with hope for them...

[CyberNerd]

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

[Midget]

Speaking as a data recovery engineer I would never EVER suggest WD.

Desktop: Seagate (although the new ones aren't as good/quiet as old) or Samsung
Laptop: Toshiba


BTW: maxtor are owned by seagate, Hitachi are now IBM not a separate company, and phillips don't actually make HDDs themselves.

[kestrel1]

I buy what ever seems best at the time. Normally WD, Seagate or Maxtor. Okay, I have had some Maxtors go bad, but I have had others go bad as well.
Got lucky once though. Had a Maxtor 40gb fail on my works PC. Nothing I could do to get the data back (not backed up, ooops) Then someone sent in thier PC that had failed. I got thier data back for them & they told me to keep the rest for spares. HD was the same model as my failed drive, swapped the controller board & got my data back (phew)
We have some real old Seagates stuck in a box about 300mb I think. Still work though.

[localzuk]

Speaking as a data recovery engineer I would never EVER suggest WD.

Desktop: Seagate (although the new ones aren't as good/quiet as old) or Samsung
Laptop: Toshiba

BTW: maxtor are owned by seagate, Hitachi are now IBM not a separate company, and phillips don't actually make HDDs themselves.

May I ask why not WD? Every person I know personally who works in IT recommend WD, so this comes as a suprise... And suggesting Samsung comes as another surprise!

[Midget]

I base my suggestions on the HDDs that we get fewest of and are easiest to recover from.

We get LOTS of WD drives and they usually have failed heads, or problems with the firmware or GLists. Either way there is a low success rate of recovery from them compared to other manufacturers. We get very few seagates, and the ones we DO get are usually just PCB failures.

Not so sure about the larger samsung drives, but the lower capacity ones are piss easy to recover and replace heads in and we don't get many of them (although that may be because they aren't as popular)

and I rate Toshiba because they are very quiet, and have a very high success rate.

DO NOT get seagate momentus laptop HDDs though, they are rubbish.
If any of you have a macbook/powerbook made in the last 2 years, they'll have these drive. Make sure you have everything backed up regularily or just throw away the drive and get a new one as they are failing alot due to Apple buying a bulk load of terrible quality chinese made units that usually gain platter damage.

[john]

I currently get Segate due to the 5 year warranty, or WD's

[m25man]

I would go with the Seagate 5yr warranty drives but,

Do be aware however that many Seagate drives are sold as OEM units, as such many of these do not have 5yrs to the end user.
These OEM units have to be returned via the OEM to the distributor or your reseller and many of these "cheap" resellers are unaware of this.

I have had this problem and a drive that I purchased as having 5yrs warranty, was refused warranty service by Seagate because of this.

The "Grey" market is in increasing problem with some of the online resellers undercutting the UK authorised distributors by 20% or more.
Im sure the guys from SCL can clarify this, but I had to back mine through EBuyer and it took weeks to sort out.

Check your drives warranty status before you fit it as it will be easier to rectify then than when it's gone down with all your data on it!

[localzuk]

Regarding warranties, I simply don't often use them - as I often have confidential information on my disks and can't really send them back.

I'll use warranties for hard disks on workstations which don't have anything confidential on them though...