Windows 7: Hitachi Deskstar…

I couldn’t think of a more appropriate place to put this, apologies if it belongs elsewhere.

That said I just bought a Cavalry CAXB 2TB External HDD but instead of a WD drive like the 500GB CAUM Series I had bought in 2008 (still going strong with no problems whatsoever)… this one has a Hitachi Deskstar (HDS5C3020ALA632).

I’ve heard some pretty horrendous things about this series of drive (the “Deathstar” nickname being the prime point here) so I am wondering if there is anything I have to worry about? Any tests I should run? Newegg reviews on this drive are about 25% negative, that's a lot of dead/defective drives.


Right now I have half of a mind to box it back up and send it back to Amazon, purely because these drives are priced at $80… I paid $138 and change for this, expecting a WD drive to boot (the drives they had always used before). Bottom line is an enclosure + cables do NOT cost $50 on top of a HDD's price point...


Opinions?

The thing with Newegg reviews is that if you look at just about any hard drive, you will find tons of people who get these DOA, they die in 3 days, etc. But I've been buying and using hard drives for years and years and years. I've used just about every brand out there, and I've never had a problem with a new drive...be it a Maxtor, Connor, Hitachi, IBM, Samsung, Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, etc. i honestly wonder what people on NewEgg do with their hardware and components to suffer so much failure. I have many computer buddies, and we have all bought tons of hard drives, and we don't get a 25% failure rate on our purchases. I'd be shocked if we suffered a 2.5% failure rate.

The term "deathstar" comes from many years ago when the "Deskstar" line with an IBM product and the 30GB drives experienced significant problems. I've actually still got one and it's working fine. But any company can have problems, for example the Seagate 7200.11 had a huge issue with firmware which bricked drives. This doesn't mean that I won't buy Seagate anymore...but I wouldn't necessarily jump on a 7200.11 model.

This Hitachi HD has been running 24/7 since Aug 2010, when I installed Windows 7 Prof from my TechNet subscription.

Seems fair enough, I guess I'll just have to wait and see.

It appears to be running OK right now, no odd noises, not too hot and it did pass Seagate's utility "short generic" along with the two WD's. Running the long generic now...

I'll go ahead and run chkdsk on it too and if it passes that then I'll be satisfied.


Sorry to be a nuisance... I'm just paranoid about new devices and hardware. Don't have a lot money so I have to be as sure as possible they won't fizzle out on me. HDD's seem to do that more often than anything else lol. And this is my first Hitachi anything so... just yeah. I'm sure we've all been 'here' before, right?

The Deskstar gained that nickname many years ago - many models ago. And it only came from one batch spanning two capacities.

The drives reliability have improved since then, but the deathstar reputation still lingers.


Similar to Seagates 7200.11 drives with bad firmware that bricked drives - except Segate bounced back easier