Best Hard Drive Manufacturer

[nawbus]

I've just had two 250Gb Western Digital hard drives fail on me in the space of around 2 months . Both were bought new in August 2005. I've decided to replace them with new Seagate ones.

What does everyone else use and recommend?

[Norphy]

Seagate if only for the standard five year warranty.

[webman]

I recommend Seagate - I have about 7 or 8 at home, and we use many more here at the school - only ever had one fail (file server at home, it got too hot :oops:). We experience more failures with Fijitsu, Maxtors and WDs.

[nawbus]

Must admit after we'd bought the WDs, I did hear that they had a bad reputation for failing!

[SteveT]

I'm sitting here being driven up the wall by bleeping from a server.

Looks like a drive has failed.

It's a Seagate!!

 

God bless RAID. At least the system will continue seamlessly till I get a replacement!

[CyberNerd]

Always liked the Hitachi Deathstars, probably seen more WD or Maxtors fail than Seagate or Hitachi- Just a feeling, don't have real figures to back it up.

[ChrisC]

My Maxtor DiamondMax drive at home has been happily running for years.

 

Chris

[nawbus]

I guess, as with most things it's luck!

Seems like the Seagate option is the best one though.

[ChrisC]

Just saw this on a website:

 

"WD produces the world’s most reliable SATA drives. "

 

Made me chuckle.

 

Chris

[nawbus]

Just saw this on a website:

 

"WD produces the world’s most reliable SATA drives. "

 

Made me chuckle.

 

Chris

 

Yeah, esp as mine are SATA drives! 100% failure rate here!

[Dos_Box]

I'm sitting here being driven up the wall by bleeping from a server.

Looks like a drive has failed.

It's a Seagate!!

 

God bless RAID. At least the system will continue seamlessly till I get a replacement!

 

I had a Seagate SCSi drive die last week. To be fair it had run 24/7 for 4 years. RAID 5 to the rescue. A new drive arived and the RAID rebuilt itself. The replacement was a Hitachi BTW!

[Elky]

As a system builder with a lot of experience, we tend to stick with Seagate hard drives as over the years, these have proved to be the most reliable drives. If a customer prefers a different manufacturer then we will of course build the PCs with the drive of their choice but we have definitely found Seagate to be the best.

[tom_newton]

I find everyone has a different favourite. there arent many different drive makers about these days, and a warranty is virtually worthless as it won't cover data.

 

WD RE series is standard in our office, and they hold up OK, noty had a failure YET. Our new appliance will come with a hitachi drive. Just remember to check what the drive is rated for, in terms of hours/month. Some are not supposed to be server grade.

 

Oddly enough, only drives I ever had serious crap from were seacrates - but that was in about 19canteen with some IDE garbage of about 600 megs

[MkII]

Didn't Seagate just take over WD?

[PeterW]

Didn't Seagate just take over WD?

 

Nope Maxtor!

 

And all the Maxtor drives are now from the seagate factories and are seagate models.

 

Only difference will be the name on the drive and the warranty, 3 years for maxtor brand with the 5 year seagate brand commanding a couple of quid premium. I guess the good news is you now get a maxtor price point with seagate build quality

 

Although with hard drive brands it does very much come down to personal preference and hourses for courses

[john]

Well I only used to recomend WD as I had no end of trouble with Maxtor, Hitachi and IBM. Seagates were OK but they only used to have a 1 year warranty, but now they have a 5 I tend to go for them over the WDs.

 

I do like the WD Raid Editions and Raptors, they have 5 years on them, and the Raptors make excellent value SCSI solutions really for small servers.

[tosca925]

Seagate

[mac_shinobi]

I've never had a sea gate but out of all the ones I have had so far WD have been the best IMO, I have a raptor 74 gig and its just worked ever since I stuck it in.

 

Best 150 quid ive spent

[NetDiag]

Best hard drive manufacturer? Well, it would be Maxtor for me because i've never had a Maxtor drive totally die on me yet.

 

Well, not strictly true there was one drive which played up so an overnight stay in the fridge was necessary then after it thawed out it starting working again. Someone told me to try it and it did!

 

Although lets not forget that HDDs are now getting cheaper because their manufacturing processes are bodged and plauged with 'cheaper' components so it's no wonder they are prone to screwing up more often.

 

I guess it's a case of they don't build them like they used to!

 

As for Raptors, i'm sure they have a better manufacturing process but I wouldnt rule them out from suffering the same fate as drives from other manufacturers eventually.

 

In my experience I have seen fit to relabel some of the worst (in my opinon) hard disc drive lines:

 

Western Digital = Western Dodgy-tall

 

(They walk tall but in a dodgy 'if drive is full up then fail' fashion)

 

IBM/Hitachi DeskStar = IBM DeathStar

 

(The DeathStar plans were not in the main computer! They were on one of these feckers! No wonder the Empire lost to the Rebels!)

 

Seagate = SuckGreat

 

Had one as a boot drive for windows 98 once and it squeeled like a kitten was trapped in the chasis fan before it went 'ping and erected its digital index digit in a way of saying your data all gone bye byes now - Have a nice day!'

 

Sods Law dicates: The bigger capacity the drive = The more prone it will to screw up once it's over 90% full!

 

It doesnt get your data back but its refreshing to hit the fallen HDD once for every 1GB of data lost! (NB This is not recommended on drives >160GB as you may need admitting to casualty because your arm fell off)

 

[Chafftech]

Best hard drive manufacturer? Well, it would be Maxtor for me because i've never had a Maxtor drive totally die on me yet.

 

 

Thats strange, we have a lot of Maxtors fail on this site they don't seem to last as long as Western Digital. Maybe its just total pot luck!

[Norphy]

No, I've found Maxtors to be absolutely atrocious. I would say we have about a 50% failure rate with them.

[Dos_Box]

Maxtors are godawful things. Very large failure rates are not uncommon. Mind you, I was also a victim of the massive disaster that Fujitsu Seimens dumped upon us and I also lost 3 years work when my IBM drive packed up 5 years ago.

[nawbus]

I was lucky, I'd guessed my drive was about to fail, so I'd backed everything up.

Thank goodness for Ghost!

[ricki]

I dont think there are a lot between the hard drive manufactures these days.

 

I have tried all sorts over the years and have had good and bad batches. If they survive more than a week then they appear to live a reasonable time.

 

Then there appears to be wall about 14 months just after some of then run out of warrenty lols especially with laptop hard drives.

 

The best advice I can give is guess and try to use some form of raid for essential data whatever you buy will always fail at the most inconvenient time.

 

I am going to replace a hard drive not in laptop thats been through 2 in the last 12 months.

 

Richard

Carr Hill High

[ranj]

do not buy IBM / hitachi drives. only had bad experience with these.

 

I tend to like maxtor drives, never had a problem with them at home, but maxtors at schools are a problem, we stick with WD or seagate drives. I think it has something to do with power voltages and maxtors dont mix well. So I have heard