Which is The Most Reliable Hard Drive Brand?

[dasickninja]

Never heard of them.

 

[vic20]

I manage a retail computer store. We see hundreds of drives fail each year.

At the moment I would say (from best to worst)

Seagate, WD, Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung

 

[Doughbuy]

I'm wondering though, I have a Fujitsu drive now... I never realized Fujitsu even made drives, but it does have a nice 3-yr warranty, the Seagate drive was same price but 20 gig's less... and I don't plan on using my laptop more than 3 years, but still Fujitsu??

Hmmm, looking at the specs, apparently HDD's have operating altitudes... (-1,000 to 40,000 ft) I wonder if they actually test them or pull numbers out of their ass... any astronaut's out here, do we use HDD's in outer space?

300,000 hr MTBF... eh, decent enough... still, never used a Fujitsu drive before, but it seems to work fine. Never touched a Samsung since I rarely see them around and I doubt they'd be cheap enough for me to buy them anyways.

Heat is what kills drives... well, heat, vibration, and shock...

 

[mesarectifier]

Heat is what kills drives... well, heat, vibration, and shock...

...and liquid, and fire.

I seem to recall a Fujitsu drive on someone's computer I was working on many years ago, but I'm not 100% sure. Actually it was a school, if ever I go back there they're probably still using it.

Do you know if Toshiba make desktop drives, or is it just 2.5"?

 

[SPARTAN-117]

300,000 hr MTBF... eh, decent enough...

That's IMO, pretty low for todays standards. I've used WD drives all my life and ain't had a problem yet from the whopping 3.5gb HDD in our first Compaq, to the 20gb HDD in my 10yr old Dell, to my mom's 200gb HDD in her Dell, to the 80gb one in my X-Box, and the Raptor and 2 Caviars I've got in my current rig. The 3 WD's in my rig all came with a 3yr warranty and all were rated for 1.2million hr MTBF. Also, my 80gb HDD in my X-Box came with a Data Lifeguard Tools disk that was a life saver in getting my drives recognized properly. All I did was drop in the CD and it did the rest, a 5 min fix at the most 😀 .

So, IMHO, I'd recommend WD as the drive of choice for the most reliable HDD's out there. Also, WD's software support is best in class as well.

 

[GSTe]

Yeah you're right mate.... Excelstor are frigging awful.... made the mistake of buying one 3 years ago. Came with a 12 month (wtf!) warranty and needless to say died shortly after the warranty period.

Since then I've had a Seagate Barracuda with damaged actuator, WD Raptor DOA, and WD My Book external 250 GB that died after 2 days.

So it appears to me to be a lottery. Someone said its not surprising they die considering what they do..... I think that's a bit of a cop-out..... why not spend some of the vast profits they make on better quality goods and production techniques? I for one wouldn't mind paying slightly more for something with greater life expectancy.

 

[mesarectifier]

Also, my 80gb HDD in my X-Box came with a Data Lifeguard Tools disk that was a life saver in getting my drives recognized properly.

It helped you install the drive to your Xbox????

 

[sprite]

Well so far in life i've had 3 HDDs.

1 Seagate 40GB which has lasted me five years.

1 Seagate 100GB which has lasted four years.

1 Hitachi 160GB which has lasted... 4 months ? Has gotten really noisy recently though and i'm getting a tad paranoid 🙁

Never had a HDD die on me yet

*touch wood* :/

 

[leo2kp]

I've used nothing but WD for my new systems and none of them have gone bad.

Because WD also has 5-year waranty Enterprise drives for a reasonable price, and because they got a lot of other neat RAID features, I'm personally sticking with WD. I curently have 2x160GB WD drives in RAID-0 and one 320GB backup drive, all SATA2 and all warantied for 5 years. They're fast as hell too. Next I'm going with a couple Raptor drives

I've had Maxtor, Seagate, WD, IBM, Hitachi, Samsung, and I can honestly say that I've never had a bad WD. All the others have needed replacement (all of them were from the early 90's though). I'm not saying that today they're all crap, but for me WD has been great for a long time.

 

[SPARTAN-117]

No it didn't. It made formating the drives in my PC really quick and painless though (need to read the whole of what I wrote before spouting off ). Oh BTW, X-Box's don't come with 80gb HDD's they come with an 8gb HDD, that is an obvious clue.

Only if we could make stupidity more painful....

In relation to what you wrote GSte, I'm agree with the guy who said that he ain't surprised that they die considering what they do. HDD's don't have an idle mode where they just spin down when not in use. Also the platter is under significant centrifugal forces at operational rotational speeds. I for one am surprised that when an HDD dies that it just doesn't "fly apart" and fracture into thousands of little peices.

 

[mesarectifier]

Oh BTW, X-Box's don't come with 80gb HDD's they come with an 8gb HDD, that is an obvious clue.

I know (check my sig!)

I was just wondering if you used these WD tools for making the somewhat complex process of installing a new hard drive to Xbox any easier (in which case where can I get 'em!)

 

[skyguy]

Oh man, I've had 3 non-Raptor Western Digitals completely crap out on me in the last 2 years. I've lost irreplaceable data on the 1st one, then got smarter and started backing up more regularly. Then lost data on the 2nd one which was my archive drive. Then the 3rd one started on the fritz.

Fool me twice, shame on me......and I got burned 3 times even with being paranoid about data backup, so what does that constitute????

Switched over to Seagate Barricuda 7200.10 w/ 16 mb cache 😉 All the way......

Maxtor...bleck. Hitachi....ouch.


Seagate FTW!

 

[derek2006]

All my hard drives owned in order from oldest to new:

Quantium Fireball 6 gig - Still works in a Imac G3. Very Loud.

Quantium Fireball 10 gig - Lasted 2 years before I got mad at the computer and kicked it. This was in the windows 98 era and I always got these illegal operation errors and one day I got very mad when MS Word made an illegal opperation error and shut down my unsaved document.

Maxter 40 gig - Lasted 2 months started having bad sectors and clicking. Only drive of mine that died on it's own.

Western Digital 60 gig - Still runs in that once beaten computer 4 years but with Windows 2000 installed .

IBM Deskstar 46.1 gig - Still runs today in my old computer for 5 years. It's a very loud and hot drive but fully functional.

Western Digital 80 gig - Got it dirt cheap lasted 4 months. I put it in my playstation 2 worked well until my brother tripped over the PS2 controller cord and the PS2 came with and the Hard Drive inside aswell.

Seagate 120 gig 7200.9 - Almost 1 1/2 years still works. Coolest and Quietest drive I own.

Seagate 160 gig 7200.7 - Almost 1 1/2 years aswell still works. Kinda loud compared to my 120 gig 7200.9 and on average 3-4 C hotter than it also.

Seagate 320 gig 7200.10 PRT - 2 Months it works. Seems to be getting louder everyday. Loudest part in my PC except for that ATI gpu cooler.

Don't own this one:
Seagate 160 gig 7200.7 from a Dell computer it clicks and wont let the computer start with it installed. Can't get data off of it. It's dead.



The brand I would most trust my data on is probably Western Digital non of them ever died on me by themselves. And that one in the playstation took a lot more than just falling that was just the final straw for it. My uncle has gotten probably 7 WD's and 1 Seagate. All of his WD's are 2 - 7 years old and his Seagate was a new one that lasted just a few months. All the WD's are still alive.

 

[leo2kp]

Ya know I gotta ask when seeing x drives of any brand failing within x years...do u have any cooling or PSU issues? I mean, heat and/or power fluctuations will kill a hard-drive. If your Seagate is new, then time will tell.

My old drives failed because:

1) They were bought as I was learning about PCs in the mid 90's and had bad sectors
2) I beat the crap out of them
3) They were just old, used hard-drives.

I expected them to die. None of my old WD drives actually died but some had bad sectors (I bought them that way for a reason). I did some work for a company that had over 80 Maxtor hard-drives fail on them within a year. They were all from the same Dell model, and we replaced them with Seagate Barracuda drives (not my choice lol).

Just out of nostalgia and the fact that WD also has a 5-year waranty, and that they've done me well, I'm just going to stick with them. I personally have nothing against newer Seagates. They seem to do alright these days

 

[BMFM]

...
Hmmm, looking at the specs, apparently HDD's have operating altitudes... (-1,000 to 40,000 ft) I wonder if they actually test them or pull numbers out of their ass... any astronaut's out here, do we use HDD's in outer space?
...

Actually there are ways of measuring that, most likely in a barometric chamber.

Nonetheless I believe "pulling things out of the ass" to be a widespread competition among executives of large corporations. :lol:

 

[SPARTAN-117]

I know (check my sig!)

Now your sig makes sense (too much school not enough me time).

Never used the WD Data Lifeguard Tools to help setup the HDD, although, we did have this fancy Auto Installer that I downloaded and the mod went without pain. 2hrs hardware mod, 1.5hrs software mod and game transfer was the time it took from begining to end.

 

[mesarectifier]

Never used the WD Data Lifeguard Tools to help setup the HDD, although, we did have this fancy Auto Installer that I downloaded and the mod went without pain. 2hrs hardware mod, 1.5hrs software mod and game transfer was the time it took from begining to end.

Slayer's auto-installer, perchance? I used Splinter Cell nDure for my first foray (still on the 8gb) and that was a real nice smooth and easy operation. Installing the Seagate, however, was not such a pleasent experience - I had to FTP in, rescue my C & E partitions and inject them into an Xbox HDM boot disk for the PC, along with my EEPROM, then go through ages of rebuilding file structures and locking/unlocking the drive. I'm sure I could do it much quicker a second time, though.

In short, replacing the drive whilst retaining all my data was a BIG BITCH, so I was just wondering if those WD tools made it at all easier in any way.

 

[plankmeister]

I've NEVER had a problem with a Seagate hard disk. I've had all sorts... and some (esp. Maxtor) die young. I currently have two 80GB Barracudas in Raid0 which have been basically running 24/7 for about 3 years... Not a single sign of problems!

*omg, I hope I haven't jinxed them now!*

 

[Seanreisk]

I worked in computer retail. I also did 2 years as the faculty manager and another 6 years as faculty advisor for a student-run computer lab that deployed about 250 new computers every fall. The computers were set up to automatically reformat and rebuild themselves every night. Maintenance was our biggest cost, and part failures went in this order: keyboard, mouse, CD-ROM, power supply fan, hard drive.

All hard drive brands have weak batches. I can remember when I specified IBM drives for 2 years because the drives were great, fast and dependable! And then came the year of the 36GB / 40GB Deskstar... I have never replaced so many drives in my life.

Does anyone remember the Quantum Bigfoot? One year our Purchasing Office 'simplified' our RFP and we got 200+ machines with Bigfoots in them. I really wanted to hate those machines. I really really wanted to hate those drives. I wanted to kill everyone in Purchasing and drink their blood. Sadly, to this day, we still talk about how amazingly, freakishly dependable those stupid Quantum Bigfoots were. Slow, yes, but most of the computers were used for MS Word, and the techs came to love those drives...

All brands have good and bad batches, but that said, I have always hated Maxtor. Through the Pentium years Maxtor was tweaky, and they seemed to get worse as they aged. And during the early years of 'autodetect' Maxtor drives would commit seppuku if the BIOS didn't get the drive information right.

For myself, I use Western Digital. I have no proof, but IMHO Western Digital seem more tolerant of being 'handled' - being swapped from computer to computer, riding around campus on repair carts, being constantly reformatted, etc.

My biggest criteria for any computer component is the ease of warranty service. Thats why I buy from Newegg. Thats another reason why I prefer Western Digital.

It's also why I buy eVGA video cards - I just got a new eVGA 8800GTS, and in several places inside the box it says, in large red print, that if the card is defective, do not return it to the retailer, but instead contact eVGA directly by web or phone for RMA information. It's bad if a product breaks, but eVGA knows that if you, the customer, have something break, and you have a good experience getting it replaced, that you'll probably buy that brand again. Because stuff breaks - no manufacturer is perfect.

If a hard drive manufacturer had a RMA process whereby I could send in the serial number of the drive and they would automatically approve me for replacement parts based on manufacturing date, and where they would cross-ship if I provided my credit card, I would immediately switch to that brand.

 

[randomcow]

My history of hard drives:

Maxtor 2x6GB -> ancient. Still works
WD 2x8GB -> ancient. Still works
IBM 2x40GB -> ancient. Both died in about 4yrs.

Seagate 2x80GB -> 5+ yrs old? no problems
WD 120GB, 80GB -> 5+ yrs? the Bad sector on the 120GB once. Magically fixed somehow and no problems now.
Maxtor 2x80GB, 30GB -> as old as above. 30GB had some probelms booting a few times. Usually works.

Maxtor 2x250GB -> 2yrs old? major problems from the beginning (both). RMAed and no problems afterwards. Probably just took a bad hit somewhere.

WD 80GB, 160GB, 250GB 1-2yrs old. no problems
Seagate 160GB, 3x320GB, 500GB 0-1yr old. no problems

..don't think I missed any..
Anyway Seagate is my favorite now. I have had ZERO problems with them so far.

Forgot to add - most of my drives in the 5yr old category went through about 2-3 years of 24/7 operation. Some retired now even if they work. Newer ones are still in the process of 24/7 operation.

 

[plankmeister]

I've got my HDDs suspended by rubber bands in my case to lower vibration. And due to the equal/opposite reaction this means there's a very low level of vibration in the drive itself too.

They're also exposed fairly decently to airflow, and never get hot... maybe a little warm to the back of the hand. I guess in an environment like that, only production flaws will make a drive fail!

 

[Dade_0182]

I've had WD and Seagate for years now (7 or 8 I think). All still running fine. Had maxtors that I bought with them and they didn't see the second year. Anyway, I'm surprised to see Seagate ahead of WD with all the people on here with Raptors.

 

[CannedTurkey]

Hard drives are always a crap shoot. Every manufacturer I've seen goes through periods of good and poor quality. We've had luck (where I work) with Fujitsu drives, but we've also had one batch where every drive eventually failed.

Whatever drive you eventually decide on, just make sure you get a good warranty.

 

[Doughbuy]

Yep, thats pretty much what I say. And therefore Seagate wins my vote of appreciation.

 

[dasickninja]

All drives eventually fail. Its just if you can predict when it fails and have you backed up the drive. speaking of which... I forgot to back up any computer in my house for at least a couple of months *oops*