Hard drive reliability

Anonymouselite5 · Dec 8, 2013

So I have your average hard drive (average for a normal user) I have a hitachi 1tb hard drive. I know it is not the best nor the fastest hdd there is. But is it reliable and will it not fail on me? Is hitachi a good brand for hdd's. When booting sometimes the desktop is slow and slower load times.

aldan · Dec 8, 2013

all hdds will fail sooner or later. its not possible to give a definitive answer to this question that is not based on personal preference or conjecture. there is nothing wrong with hitachi hard drives although i lean towards western digital (personal preference). boot times will vary due to a lot of factors ie operating system,programs that load with windows,processes that start with windows etc.if you can post your specs there might be some tweaks that will make your boot and performance a little faster.also,by slow,what is your actual boot time?

viper1979 · Dec 8, 2013

The only HDD i recommend is Western Digital. There are also different speeds of HDDs. 5400, 7200, 10k...etc.. I have never used a hitachi drive before so I don't know what to say about that.

Have you considered going SSD? Very fast boot times and all loading times are reduced. Check out Plextor if you are interested in pursuing this.

-T

Anonymouselite5 · Dec 8, 2013

aldan :

Boot times are fine, Just when I log in the desktop may load slowly, The graphics driver (ccc) may not sometimes load until a little later. specs should be fine, i5 3570 and 7850

Anonymouselite5 · Dec 8, 2013

viper1979 :

I don't have much money to spend on an ssd. Also I think the Hitachi one is 5400rpm

giantbucket · Dec 8, 2013

i've had a 100G Hitachi that i extracted from a laptop made in 2006, and it's been my Win7x64Pro OS drive for years, and a previous OS before that. worked perfectly if a bit slow (eh, 2.5" drives are usually 5400rpm anyways, except for WD Black). still works perfectly as an external drive in a portable case. so, it's what, 7 years old? never had any issues with it. S.M.A.R.T. data scans show it to be in better shape than a younger Seagate 3.5" drive, so... read into that whatever you like.

eventually, all drives either succumb to failure or irrelevance (by just being too darned small and it being cheap to buy a new one 10X larger)

Anonymouselite5 · Dec 9, 2013

giantbucket :

So they're not too bad just not a faster speed. Is there a way to make it load all my drivers and desktop faster? error checking helps and defrag helps sometimes. I understand it won't be as fast as my laptops ssd but I find it a bit weird when my gpu driver takes a few minutes to actually start up

viper1979 · Dec 9, 2013

download HDtune onto your computer. www.hdtune.com

Get the free version. Run a benchmark and post your results here. Make sure you select your Hitachi drive.

-T

Anonymouselite5 · Dec 10, 2013

viper1979 :

On the benchmark it got
minimum read rate : 5.9mb/s
max read: 178.8mb/s
and here's the graph
http://imgur.com/FbgdrUo

viper1979 · Dec 10, 2013

Anonymouselite5 :

The performance does seem to be all over the place, but the speed doesn't seem to be the problem. This sounds like an issue with software at this point. Perhaps the best free solution is to do a reinstall of the OS. This will restore the speed you once had. If you have already done that, look at purchasing an SSD drive. You can buy a Plextor M5P Xtreme 256 or 128 drive for around 220/110.

Here is a purchase link if you do go down that route.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820249033&Tpk=plextor%20m5P%20Xtreme

Good luck!

-T

RCguitarist · Dec 10, 2013

I have had western digital drives in several computers over the years and not one has ever failed. Not even the one in my 8 year old laptop.

Anonymouselite5 · Dec 10, 2013

viper1979 :

Anonymouselite5 :

The performance does seem to be all over the place, but the speed doesn't seem to be the problem. This sounds like an issue with software at this point. Perhaps the best free solution is to do a reinstall of the OS. This will restore the speed you once had. If you have already done that, look at purchasing an SSD drive. You can buy a Plextor M5P Xtreme 256 or 128 drive for around 220/110.

Here is a purchase link if you do go down that route.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820249033&Tpk=plextor%20m5P%20Xtreme

Good luck!

-T

Thank you, could it also be software which is not my OS?

viper1979 · Dec 15, 2013

Anonymouselite5 :

viper1979 :

Thank you, could it also be software which is not my OS?

It sounds like it is a mixture of the two. Perhaps you should look at a reload or try disabling items from booting. Does the computer start fine in safemode?

Anonymouselite5 · Feb 11, 2014

Thank you, could it also be software which is not my OS? [/quotemsg]

It sounds like it is a mixture of the two. Perhaps you should look at a reload or try disabling items from booting. Does the computer start fine in safemode?[/quotemsg]

It starts fine in safemode and it loads the desktop fine. But open google chrome takes a while. Opening a folder also takes longer than expected

aldan · Feb 11, 2014

go to the search bar in the start menu and type msconfig then click on the icon in the search pane. then click on startup and see how many programs are loading at computer startup.uncheck any that are not needed on startup. the majority of programs you install seem to start with the computer by default.this does not mean they have to. i have only two at startup.my antivirus and my weather eye for my desktop.this will considerably shorten boot times.another thing you can do to speed this up is to change some processes from starting automatically to manually. before you do this i would suggest having a look at this tutorial.

http://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-7-service-pack-1-service-configurations/

Anonymouselite5 · Feb 11, 2014

aldan :

I have already done that and it has sped it up a bit. In the tutorial it says changing some of the services too? would this make loading times less as well?

aldan · Feb 11, 2014

absolutely.any process that is set to auto will start with windows and run in the backround as well.i run an old triple core phenom circa 2009 and it boots to the desktop in about 30secs.

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