Which is The Most Reliable Hard Drive Brand?

[Bosaka]

I used to always say go maxtor till my 2 Max 10 200gb drives failed within 2 weeks of each other, when I bought them from newegg it stated 3 year warranty. The drives however showed up as not being under warranty at maxtors website. Maxtor refused to honor it so I went Seagate, I really like them and their 5 year warranty makes me really happy. Their performance is great and the new 7200.10's run quiet and pretty cool. I would recommend the Barracuda ES line, they are like 5% higher in price but they are supposedly business optimized for increased reliability, lifespan and RAID performance. I hear good things about the Western Digital RE line which is their answer to the Barracuda ES and also has a 5 year warranty. Ohh and last thing, HDDs are so cheap these days you might want to at a minimum buy 2 of them and have one mirror the other in a RAID 1 config that way you dont lose your important 100's of gigs of data.

 

[randomcow]

In the last ten years or so that I can recall the only significant data loss I have had was when I had data corruption problems which were completely unrelated to the hard drives. I would say that with a good brand like WD or Seagate your chance of losing data through drive failure is very small..i.e. I don't think RAID1 is very useful for most of us. I think a simple manual backup to external media or drives is a more effective.

 

[aspv2]

i have had 2 external drives die on me. I opened both up and found WD hard drives inside 🙁

 

[goonting]

really hard to tell which brand... i have both great experience with WD and Seagate drives..

 

[cjl]

Um, OK...

I'd say Seagate, with the caveat that they've had some trouble with the 7200.11's reliability wise. The 7200.10's are great drives though, and the newest 7200.11's (the ones with 375GB/platter, including the new 1.5TB model) should be better.

 

[padank]

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

...and liquid, and fire.

-----Dont forget bears. A bear will not do kind things to a hard drive. Downright
mean if you ask me.


Any brainstorming ideas for the manufacturers? I guess the only real answers are the best
possible protective packaging. I wonder if there is any way to buy drives closer to the source.
I think folks that rely on drives for a living would be very interested in paying a bit extra for
upgraded packing and direct from the manufacturer. Picture this: when I package some thing
fragile/heavy I put enough heavy duty bubble wrap so that when I am done, I feel as though
I can drop the bubble wrapped pack on the floor from waist level. Then I put a heavy
duty box (or 2) around that. This way it is "floating on air". Do I think Maxtor is going to do this?
Prob not. But, maybe this thread will give someone some ideas.
Any physicists want to chime in on Bubble vs the ubiquitous Styrofoam or cardboard most
of the shippers use?

 

[cjl]

Drives can handle incredibly high levels of shock when not running though. Operating shock is what kills drives.

 

[nothingbetter2do]

avoid Western Digital Hard drives........ out of the 3 drive i have bought within the last year all 3 have failed and their customer service sucks also they only have 1 year warrenties if they are external drives........ somewhere in WD a bright spark manager decided to cut costs by switching to cheaper parts suppliers......the result is poor quailty hard drives with short lifespans........ google it on amazon if you dont believe me you'll see a huge list of complaints about WD drives...


stick with seagate or samsung

 

[bandras]

once it looked good to me ot buy a 120gb maxtor ide drive.. worst choice of my life. i ended up in a warranty loophole.. they gave 2 years warranty, that was the real lifespan of each and every drive.. i had 5 drives so far, each lasted 1.5-2 years, then died, without any forecast signs, just out of the blue, BSOD, restart, then the results varied from could boot but lost half the data on it, to couldn't even partition or format anymore..

i just didn't feel like buying another drive, this way i had a new hdd every two years. i had backups, so data security wasn't an issue for me..

since i first bought a sata mobo, i've been using a samsung drive, which is operating fine so far.

back in the old days i had a wd drive, which lasted for 3 years, then i sold it it perfect condition, and an ibm drive, which by the time i wanted to sell it, started generating bad sectors..

 

[jaguarskx]

From my experience:

Maxtor = Absolute garbage = All died.
Seagte = 33% of the drives I've owned died; 1 out of 3 drives.
Western Digital = None died, but one 160GB HDD developed ~40BG of bad sectors.
IBM DeskStar (DeathStar) 75GXP 60GB = Best drive I ever used and the only IBM drive I ever bought. Lasted from 2000 - May 2008 when I finally decided it was time for it to retire it.

I currently use Seagate drives for anything less than 250GB.

All drives larger than 250GB are Western Digital.

All my 1TB drives are Western Digital Caviar RE2 GP WD1000FYPS.

 

[Jonn]

Have a few very old Western Digital hard drives, a 540MB that was manufactured in 1993, a 1.2GB that was manufactured in 1994, and a 2.1GB that was manufactured in early 1996. All of them work fine to this day with no bad sectors. The 540MB and 1.2GB drives did 24/7 duty in a computer that ran a dial-up bulletin board from May of '93 to Nov of '96. The 540MB was the original drive and the 1.2GB was added later for more file storage. Ran the board on a 486-66 with 16MB (the memory cost $800 in 1993!) and later 32MB ($200 in '95) under OS/2 Warp. Software was PCBoard, then went to PCBoard/2 which was a native OS/2 version. It was a big deal to upgrade from 14.4k modems to 28.8k! NT killed OS/2, and it wasn't until XP that Windows caught up in the multi-threaded/protected mode multitasking arena. OS/2 ran three nodes of the BBS on that little 486, while I ran Word, Excel and Peach Tree in Windows sessions and the system was more responsive than a $300 Dell P4 running XP. :lol:

Anyway, I drifted off topic...

Also have a Raptor 74GB ('03 build) and a 120GB Caviar ('05 build) in this computer that have been trouble free.

 

[khelben1979]

Western Digital without a doubt.

 

[msdobrescu]

Would be interesting to know which line of drives is better for each brand.

 

[Hash-82]

Funny results....
In every case where I have seen *any* documentation between Seagate and WD failure rates, Seagate fails at a 2:1 rate over WD. But, WD is rated lower than Seagate for reliability.

*shrug*

Must be the same people that voted for "change"....

 

[wuzy]

The very existence of this thread is just goes to prove how little understanding people know about HDD reliability. In short, they all fail eventually.
Faulty batch drives are rare and they fail before their warranty period expires, totally unpredictable.

It is this nature that requires important data on any mechanical HDD to be backed up.

 

[Pointertovoid]

You may read Google's report on Hdd reliability. As the biggest Hdd user, they have a huge experience and decided to publish it. A few of their conclusions:
- Temperature has no effect
- Model and batch are much more important than brand
(which is pretty obvious from the 7200.11)

That said, I lost a WD, a Seagate (older than 7200.11) and a Maxtor, but no Samsung, no Hitachi nor Excelstor.

Excelstor is Hitachi technology, with all advantages except it's a bit older. I have 5 of them (J8080, J8160 = Hds721680) for years without a worry.

 

[scorch0062]

I would definitely say Samsung,
Mine has given me NO problems over the couple years i have had it
And their customer service is good
and their hard drives have good performance too 😀

 

[andy5174]

Seagate 12 is better for system drive and WD black is better for storage.

However, WD is known to be good all the time, whereas, the Seagate had heaps of problem with the firmware in its 10th and 11th gen.

In addition, 5-year warranty for the WD Blacks and 3 years only for Seagte.

Furthermore, WD's attitude towards the warranty service is much better than Seagate according to many peoples.

Hence, in my opinion, people should get WD Black if they don't want to take any risk.

+1 for WD Black
(BTW, the WD 1TB BLACK is noisy though)

 

[mith36]

I used to like seagate, but after the 7200.11 fiasco and my own situation (see current thread), I am going to have to say WD. I now have 3 WD drives, 2 1TB and a 750GB.

 

[inspector71]

I would go with seagate 7200. I use 3 of them and they are reliable and fast. I like them alot. I remember when Maxtor hard drives where the best, what ever happened to their good reputation?

 

[shadowchaser]

samsmsung..

 

[Richy0money]

deskstar rules my tower. use seagate when i have to (externals and such). i know its an old thread, but im breathin' new life with my experience on the subject.

never saw a dead deskstar yet, just retired deskstars.

 

[Richy0money]

I would go with seagate 7200. I use 3 of them and they are reliable and fast. I like them alot. I remember when Maxtor hard drives where the best, what ever happened to their good reputation?

maxtor always managed to screw me over.

 

[bbneo]

I've had 4 Western Digital external USB drives, and I am pretty sure that I have a hardware failure with my 500 Gb (RMA and data recovery in process), and I think I have some problems with a 120 and 160 that I have backed up and "retired" to shoeboxes for now. I also just recently bought a 1 Tb WD ext drive, but the heat and wear and tear issue is probably a good argument against using this 24/7.

I had a 20 Gb (remember those) WD caviar internal drive fail in a desktop about a year ago after about 10 years of service.

All of these drives are on just about 24/7.

What I don't understand is why I have had several apparent failures with relatively young external USB HDD, but not so much with my internal drives. (I have 3 computers, 2 which are 10 years old, and, one which is 2 years old, and a brand new msi NetTop.)

I think I have found part of the answer in this discussion: heat

The internal drives are: 1) lower capacity = less heat, and 2) inside a fan-cooled enclosure.

I did read about an interesting approach to long term data backup just recently... external hard drive dock. ThermalTake is one manufacturer. For $50, you plug in an internal SATA drive, backup your data, and then remove it for storage... off, no wear, no heat, no tear.

 

[4Ryan6]

HDD recommendations mostly come from peoples experiences, "I had a bad this, or bad that! OOOHH Stay Away", indicating the entire HDD brand is bad, yet another user has never had a problem with exactly the same brand HDD.

Manufacturers don't purposely flood the market with crap HDDs, sometimes manufacturing or shipping can affect the HDD, and sooner or later every manufacturer will accidentally allow a lemon out the door.

What really matters is how well a manufacturer stands behind their product and replaces it, if it is bad.

My advice is buy the HDD you get the best sale price on, for the size and type you need, no matter what the brand name is.