Which hard drive brand do you recommend?

joe.pelayo · #1 11th March 2007, 03:47 AM

Hello everybody.

My laptop's hard drive is dying so I must replace it. However I would like to know, in your experience which brand is better for hard drives? Bad experiences perhaps?

I am currently planning to get an ATA/100 160GB Samsung hard drive at 5400RPM based in capacity/RPMs only, but before I buy it I want to see the results of this poll.

Thanks.
Joe.

***Dan*** · #2 11th March 2007, 04:07 AM

Hmmm.

Purely subjective, of course, but in my experience, in desktops, I have come to avoid Seagate and Western Digital. Seagate because they just don't play well with others, and Western Digital because of an abnormally high failure rate. I now run Maxtors exclusively in the desktops.

In my laptops, I am currently running both Fujitsu and Hitachi drives with no complaints so far. (And one old IBM Travelstar.)

Hope it helps,

Dan

lazlow · #3 11th March 2007, 04:28 AM

I have had a lot of problems with Fujitsu and Maxtors. I also have seen a lot of WD fail (within a week) in the last couple of years. I have 6 320gb Seagates with no trouble and no conflicts spread over the last year and a half in three machines. These machines also have old ibm deskstars and older WD (when 160gb was first common). All this info is on Desktops only.

Lazlow

#4 11th March 2007, 04:46 AM

As you can see, I've got three IBM/Hitachi drives in this machine

Wayne

***Firewing1*** · #5 11th March 2007, 05:02 AM

Honestly, I see things two conflicting ways at once.
(1) In the end, it always boils down to this: When you buy hardware people are usually worried about what's better for your hardware's life. In the end, you usually replace hardware because it's obsolete before it fails, so just why which brand has the best price for what you need. If they had bad products, they wouldn't have made it in the business right?
Then there's (2): Western Digital all the way!

Firewing1

joe.pelayo · #6 11th March 2007, 05:26 AM

Hello Firewing1.

I agree in your statements, for desktop. However this time I am replacing the drive because it failed, that is why I do care about the brand. Besides laptop hard drives are more likely to fail than desktop's, aren't they?

Thanks.
Joe.

***Firewing1*** · #7 11th March 2007, 05:42 AM

Yes, in general much more likely because of heat and their small size.
Firewing1

joe.pelayo · #8 11th March 2007, 06:57 AM

Does anyone else want to vote?

evilinux · #9 11th March 2007, 07:09 AM

well I have been using seagates but I had one fail after 2 years. Now they have increased their warranty to 5 years though so if you buy one now you should be ok as long as you save the receipt. WHoever has the longest warranty is probably the most reliable, or if they're not they won't be in business long.

#10 11th March 2007, 07:25 AM

I've only had one disk go bad and that was a Western Digital

I can't believe I had to ship it to Singapore to get a replacement!

Wayne

skyshadow · #11 11th March 2007, 07:33 AM

In my opinion it all comes down to service. Equipment is going to fail if it is mass produced. Its the law of nature. The question should be who is going to give me the most reliable and quickest replacement if thier hardware does fail. I havent' had a harddrive fail in a while but i did have a maxtor fail on me once. It took one phone call and i had an rma in 15 minutes and a replacement in 4 days. I spent the extra money to send it overnight but either way a 4 day turnaround cost me 15 bucks. I was happy with that. I currently run maxtor in every pc i have now because of that experience. Maybe others have had better experience with other hd manufacturers but i tend to look torward service rather than length of life. might keep that in mind when looking for a new hard drive.

joe.pelayo · #12 11th March 2007, 06:17 PM

Anyone else?

klapa · #13 11th March 2007, 08:52 PM

From about six years experience with "24/7" machines, I would say:

First - I think you are talking only IDE here:

WD most failure prone of them all. I've had allot of them over the years - and they always fail with that "click, click, click" - rarely have I gotten more than 1-2 years out of a WD drive. I've at least 4 of them here - 1 80GB, 2 20 GB, and 1 30 GB - that I have just not gotten around to throwing out yet - but they are surely "paperweights".

Only other experience with IDE for extended periods is Maxtor - and these have performed very well for me. I've got my router using two Maxtor 40GB IDE drives that has been up for the most part of two years now - 24/7 - no problems.

That being said - I will go on to say that you just can't compare any IDE drive with a SCSI - at least for the drives I've had (note - most of my stuff is old and "ebay" stuff - not the latest and greatest SATA, etc.)

I had my server running for four years now - with two 1991 vintage single ended HP server 9GB SCSI drives as the system drives in a SW RAID1 - I finally had one of those drives fail last week. I had - at one point - 294 days of uptime on that system - the only thing that spoiled that record was a power outage which lasted over 3 minutes (the limits of my UPS).

Aside from that - I'v had for the same mount of time two LVDS SCSI drives on that machine - and they are still running strong. One of them is a Seagate - and the other a Quantum (now Maxtor).

Thus - if one considers that these SCSI drives come with a 5 year warranty - and IDE drives with a 1 year warranty - then we begin to get the picture. While the SCSI drives cost about twice as much - in my experience they last 5 times longer.

***Firewing1*** · #14 11th March 2007, 09:51 PM

From my experience I've had no WD drives fail, and they're great - Fast, inexpensive pricing, and for me at least, reliable.
Firewing1

lazlow · #15 11th March 2007, 10:09 PM

I think the basic problem is that every manufacturer (sooner or later) has a bad run of drives or just a plain bad model. If you are unlucky enough to have bought one of these drives it burns you on the brand. An even worse example of this would be when a company has multiple manufacturing plants. One plant makes good drives and the 2nd plant makes lemons(same drive model). Seagate had this problem last year, the drives made in one country were made with different components than the drives from another. Both sets of drives were sold in the US. One countries drives were fast, quiet, and bullet proof, the other countries were slow, loud and often failed in the first day. Until it came to light(two country thing) reading reviews of this (in the end these) drive(s) was maddening. Half the people would rate the drive as fantastic and half would rate it as total junk (and very little in between).

I guess what I am saying is, worry less about brands and check out the reviews of the specific drive you are thinking about buying. I like newegg's customer reviews, but there are a lot of other places to get reviews.

Lazlow