Windows 7: Hard Drive Advise

I hope that you didn't buy any of the Seagate 7200.11 drives while you had your eyes closed, because it is a well known fact that these drives are generally lemons. I do not have the advantage that a technician has, with being able to see patterns in their customer's problems with components...that is why I ask questions such as this, because some of you on this forum do.

I know that one private person's experience, such as mine is not enough to judge an entire product line, and I might even forgive a company for producing a bad lot of drives, IF they properly rectified the problem, by replacing them with good replacements, but that is something, that in my experience, Seagate has not done with the 7200.11s. This fact is sufficient for me not to trust any of their other products, regardless of other's individual satisfactory experience. This may change in time, but not quickly, and not without reason.

I had similar experience with WD drives, as far as high failure rates, which kept me from buying their products, but that could have been due to incredibly bad luck on my part. That is the reason that I bought these FAEXs. It is possible that I'm over reacting, but I do know that these drives are over priced, they produce unusual rattley noise when under a load, and that I have bad sectors on two out of 3 of the one that I own. I do not know how well WDC handles their RMA process, but I am sure that it will not cure the noise problem, because that is just the way that these drives are.

I might buy some other WDC drive, but it will not be a decision that I will make hastily, and not without something more that one person's experience. Of course, one person's experience is all that most of us can post, but when I see sufficient post counts that agree, that is a witness that I am able to use in my decision process.

For these reasons, endorsements of brand names don't mean too much to me, because their is no brand that is all good, or all bad.

If I could afford to go that route, I probably would, but SSDs are too expensive for me, especially considering their price/size ratio.

I have a hard drive 7200.11 series. Once bought, I found that there was a firmware update available. I updated the firmware and it's been three years without problems. And my eyes are wide shut!

Yes, but that firmware update only applies to a portion of the 7200.11s, not mine. I'm glad that your drive has held up so far, but that should be the case with the majority of the drives of that catagory, not just a select few.

Maybe I'm a lucky guy, just that ...

well if you're not into a speed and you are more on a storage use only, try using a a bit lower speed, you mentioned that you have 7200.11 why don't you try the 7200.9 or 7200.10 my 2 160GB Seagate drives serves me for about 3yrs now. and no bad sectors. and by the way if you format the drive a lot, try to avoid it.

If you're going to get a spinner get a Western Digital Caviar Black. Very good drive, however stay away from the 64 meg SATA 3 blacks, they're noisy as hell....

- SATA 6 WD Caviar Black 1TB
- Velociraptor

At any rate in all my years (since 1998) of using Western Digital I've only had 2 go bad, though they never "completely" failed. This speaks of Western Digital's consistency in reliability.

My two cents.

I can easily agree with you on that, because the FAEXs that I mentioned are SATA 3s. I'm not sure if your velociraptor link is an endorsement or a warning, but it doesn't matter, because they cost too much for me. Your history with WDC drives has been much better than my own.

My 2TB WDC is a slower drive that is used for video storage and it is fine for that purpose. I think that its lower speed is an advantage me, because it resides in an external case, that even though it has a fan, a drive runs hotter than it would internally. I'm hoping that its lower speed/temp will promote it's life expectancy.

As for the other models, I would need something more than just a general suggestion. 160GB would be sufficient, if I only used it for the OS, but I kind of like having a couple of extra partitions. That is why I have targeted a 500GB drive.

EDIT: It just sunk in that you were speaking of Seagate drives, I'm not ready to go in that direction at the moment.

Im using an internal Seagate Barracuda 120GB HDD that I got for free at work since it was refurbished - no problems whatsoever, and that IS a refurbished model!

Also, my PC is set up to have just Windows 7, and a few essential programs on that drive, and I use an external drive for storing all my main data - brand? Seagate.

You more than likely have bad luck, but I'd check your motherboard health to be sure, because it could be whats killing the drives.

It could also be a faulty drive controller chip on the board thats killing your drives.