HDD Reliability

[CDBurner]

What are the most reliable HDDs? Maxtor, WD, Seagate, or something else?

 

[GhostKat]

hehehe that depends on opinion and the experience of who you ask. The most unbiased answer is that all hard drives will fail sooner or later simply because it has moving parts. I've got a WD 20 gig, a samsung 40 gig, a maxtor 80, and a maxtor 120gig. Out of the bunch of them the Samsung is the most quiet drive. The maxtor's on a random read are the second noisest and the WD is the worst for sound and it's slow but I've had it for so long it's out of warrenty so it's old technology. My WD had some bad clusters and thier software fixed it, the 80 gig maxtor also had some bad clusters here recently and something happened with the smart controller and needed to get replaced. I don't think brand really matters that much in today's world, what matters is your backup strategy for when things do go wroung, and believe me they will go wrong regardless of brand, speed, and cache.

In today's market getting any of the drives with 8mb cache, also means it comes with a 3 year warranty for replacement. I would get one of them simply because the warranty means I'm not out of money in a single year and 3 years from now they will have better drives that I might get as a replacement.

GK

Yes, I made it past newbie w00t.

 

[elzt]

You didn't mention IBM...maybe you already know it has some bad records on the HDD products recently.

No one can tell which of today's Maxtor, WD and Seagate HDDs is the most reliable as they aren't on the market long enough to show that. BTW, I have an old Quantum 540MB drive in one of my office PCs. It's still running fine without any bad sector after nearly 10 years of usage.

 

[CDBurner]

Thanks. I was wondering because in the last couple of years I have had several bad experiences with WD drives, and I was just wondering if those were just coincidences or if other drives were better quality. BTW, my newest drive is a Maxtor, and it has seemed to be better than the old WDs.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by cdburner on 04/02/03 11:47 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[elzt]

Maxtor, WD and Seagate all make good and reliable hard drives, but still, like any product, there would be cases of problem reported by users either due to misuse of hard drives or defects in the drives.

 

[dhlucke]

The best? Leave that to preference. I'd say WD for me.

The worst is well known though. Don't buy an IBM drive.

<font color=red>GOD</font color=red> <font color=blue>BLESS</font color=blue> <font color=red>AMERICA</font color=red>

 

[Javic]

As elzt said, IBM have a history of having many problems. I did have one of the "Deathstars" but I was one of the lucky ones (sort of), mine didn't fail until after about 2 1/2 years. In any case, until they become tried and true to not have their problems of the past, I won't be buying another IBM anytime soon. One thing to note, IBM's drive division is now owned and operated by Hitachi so hopefully their production will improve. When I RMA'd my failed 30GB drive (to Hitachi), they sent me back a 40GB drive as a replacement, supporting ghostkat's comment about possibly getting a better drive when you RMA your old one.

Right now I'm using 14 of the WD Special Editions and love them. The three year warranty is a major bonus over the Maxtor drives, and that was a large selling point for me when I was shopping around. On top of that, the track record I've had with the WD SE's is why I have and will continue to buy the WD drives.

 

[CDBurner]

Thank you for your replies, everyone. I am encouraged to hear that WD drives are generally good, as are most other brands (IBM seems to be the exception, of course).

 

[onemaggot]

I was all set to buy a Western Digital 8mb cache until I read the reviews at newegg. I was astonished with the number of reviews that complained about doa or quick failures. Anybody know what is up with this? Is the quality as bad as they would suggest? Here's the link.

http://secure.newegg.com/app/CustratingReview.asp?item=22-144-118

 

[Javic]

I can't say much about the reviews, but I have

2 WD800JB's
8 WD1200JB's
2 WD2000JB's

None of them have been DOA and I haven't had a single problem with any of them. My vote has been and will continue to be for the WD SE drives.

 

[lhgpoobaa]

All drives fail eventually.
Some people have had good experiences with a certain manufacturer, another not so good.
The exception is IBM... where i think everyone has had a bad experience. Avoid IBM.

I prefer seagate or W.D.
Seagate as they make very quiet drives... W.D. as their 8Mb cache drives are very fast and still come with a useful 3 year warantee... most other drives only have 1 year now.

<b>Damn War! I'm too young to watch other people die!</b>
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