Western Digital, Samsung, or Seagate?

as a point of preference i would stay as far away from samsung as you can, i bought three drives of theres and had to get three replacements all within like 6-7 months, of the three replacements two died within a few months and one is still kinda running to this day. i decided not to even bother with trying to replace the replacements as they were refurbs anyways. hope thats a help to you!

Thanks greatly for the replies. andrew66553, that was exactly the kind of experience I was looking for, thanks for the heads up. OvrClkr, do you mind me asking what makes the Samsung F3 better than the others that I listed? When I looked at the specs on newegg, the hard drives seemed to be very similar (besides the capacity. 320gb vs. 500gb).

To be honest, when I buy a drive the first thing I look at is reliability and speed. I have built several PC's using Caviar Blacks and have friends that have built with the F3's and to this date I have not seen/heard of any issues so far. When you buy a platter drive you always have a small % of failure rate no matter what. So try to get a brand/model that has a good track record and you should be fine. Last time I built a PC with a seagate drive it had bad sectors and ended up RMA'ing the drive. Since then it's been all Western Digital for me...

My suggestion is a Caviar Black, they just work.... F3's have a good track record also, I guess its a matter of taste. To this date I have purchased around 10 Black drives for raid arays and (knock on wood) not one issue so far...

Look at the reviews and you will see what I mean =)

Ah, now I understand. Thanks very much for the recommendation.

Western Digital got the more reliable hard drive right now. Still, it will never match the old Seagate... but the new Seagate... how can a company goes from the best to the worst manufacturer?

I've been using WD exclusively for qbout 15 years and never lost a byte of data that wasn't my fault.

+1^^ lol , IDK what the hell happen... Seagates were tier 1 drives back in the day... Of course this does not apply to all seagates, there are many that have 0 issues as well, I just don't want to take that chance again...

Another +1 for the WD Blacks. The F3s do look good tho...

PS: Just make sure you have good backups. RAID0 offers no redundancy.

Yeah, that's why I am having a separate 500gb hard drive off my RAID 0 array for my precious music and movie files. I'm going to install only the OS (including games and programs) on my array. It's of my understanding though, that RAID 0 arrays have higher chances of failing and eminently lose data, but I'm assuming this phenomena doesn't occur often. Especially when one buys decent hard drives. Am I wrong on this one?

My 640's have been in Raid0 since x-mas of last year and not one hiccup so far....

Ok, cool. That's very reassuring. Thank you.