Western Digital to buy Hitachi disk unit

Between our two sons and myself we have had too many WD's burn out!
We are mostly SeaGate fans now.

Well our oldest son went MAC on us, pretty damn smart of him I think!
No more late night upgrades, blue screens and etc!

MACs aren't infallible and the only reason updates aren't as much an issue for them is because they charge for their updates.

Perhaps when I'm a billionaire I'll consider them a viable alternative.

I've worked in the IT field for 14 years now and have seen failures of pretty much every brand of hard drive. Maxtor, connor, seagate, western digital, toshiba, hitachi, ibm, samsung, etc.

Generally speaking, my worst experiences have been with Maxtor and my best experiences have been with WD and Seagate. Between WD and Seagate, I tend to prefer WD these days as they haven't have the cataclymic failures with certain firmware versions such as the infamous Seagate 7200.11.

RLHoldenSr said:

Well our oldest son went MAC on us, pretty damn smart of him I think!
No more late night upgrades, blue screens and etc!

Also had handfuls of MAC's over the years in my work environments, and they too fail I'm afraid. Motherboards give out, drive controllers die, monitors give out. If you are under the impression that they never die, just sit outside an Apple store at the mall for an hour or so and see how many people lug in an imac, macbook, etc for repairs. It's not all sunshine and rainbows.

pparks, thanks for putting things into perspective. There is no piece of hardware or software that will not fail eventually - that is something I learned during my 35 years in the trade.

pparks1 said:

I've worked in the IT field for 14 years now and have seen failures of pretty much every brand of hard drive. Maxtor, connor, seagate, western digital, toshiba, hitachi, ibm, samsung, etc.

Generally speaking, my worst experiences have been with Maxtor and my best experiences have been with WD and Seagate. Between WD and Seagate, I tend to prefer WD these days as they haven't have the cataclymic failures with certain firmware versions such as the infamous Seagate 7200.11.

RLHoldenSr said:

Well our oldest son went MAC on us, pretty damn smart of him I think!
No more late night upgrades, blue screens and etc!

Also had handfuls of MAC's over the years in my work environments, and they too fail I'm afraid. Motherboards give out, drive controllers die, monitors give out. If you are under the impression that they never die, just sit outside an Apple store at the mall for an hour or so and see how many people lug in an imac, macbook, etc for repairs. It's not all sunshine and rainbows.

Don't they call them logic boards??

Maguscreed said:

MACs aren't infallible and the only reason updates aren't as much an issue for them is because they charge for their updates.

Perhaps when I'm a billionaire I'll consider them a viable alternative.

Macs infallable? I can have someone pass along numerous viruses seen for that OS? if you want! He cleans off that other guy's OS quite often as well as pcs working in a repair shop.

As for any brand of drive failing at times people often forget they are mass produced on production lines and why the companies provided limited warrantys in case any fail from a defect.

I've been fortunate not to see any WD fail on me while one used drive passed along eventually became worn out. A friend saw a few WDs with bad sectors when he first got them new.

The one other things often overlooked by more people then you would think are things like keeping drive temps down as well as occasional defrags, etc. Too often drives are simply neglected and end up seeing more wear and tear in a shorter period of time.

Now we will simply need to wait and see how and if any quality suffers from the buyout once everything at Hitachi is retooled by WD. Hopefully the turn out will be similar to what was seen for ATI chips once AMD bought ATI out with improvements.