The big HDD poll!

[Corpsecrank]

I just want to see what everyone is using and prefers.

Personally I use western digital and seagate both. I have actually never had a seagate fail on me but I have had a western digital fail once just tonight so I rely on both as they are both pretty good brands.

Brands I would avoid though above all is maxtor. I had 3 of those go in one year. I bought all of them around the same time and I replaced all of them about the same time after they all failed one after another. It sucked. I would also avoid those hitachi drives because I have seen a lot of those go bad also.

So vote for your favorite drives and post your personal experience with drives you have owned.

 

[smarteyeball]

Brands I would avoid though above all is maxtor.

I had two Maxtor 320GB drives about 2 years. About the 1 year mark, both drives failed within a very short time of each other. Or so I thought.

After re-building an old rig, on a whim I thought I'd retry both the drives. One was definitely dead, but the other was fine. It turned out to be a flaky PSU. Since the re-build that working maxtor has been used 24/7 for torrenting and it's still going strong.

I still wouldn't buy a Maxtor by choice (I didn't in the first place, but that's a different story )

With todays drives, it's luck of the draw when it comes to failure rates across all brands.

 

[holo88]

seagate. ... i guess for no particular reason. (if there is one, i havent found it yet)

 

[SquonkSC]

Samsung for me.

After installing several hundreds of HDD's in peoples system's and my own, I can say a few things about HDD's.

1. Maxtor = cr*p 80% of them never make it past the 2nd yr, and too much of them were DOA. Further more they are noisy, and energy inefficient.
Performance is good.

2. WD has been on a downhill slope in the race with Maxtor, until last year.
Same story, too many failing disks.
The new generation seems to be a lot more solid, and a lot quieter and energy efficient. If they are build to last, is yet to be proven.
Performance is excellent.

3. Seagate is a strange brand. Some series perform excellent and last long, other series are utter cr*p. The problem is you don't know in advance which series will do good. They are generally very quiet, and averagely energy efficient.

4. Hitachi is a solid, quiet, energy efficient, good lasting quality, but a bit of an underachiever. They clearly chose for durability over speed.
They do have some noisy series but most are very quiet.

5. Fujitsu. Very durable, quiet and efficient, but like Hitachi it is slow.

6. Samsung: My personal favorite and number one in any discipline.
I have clients that still have the drive I build into their system 7 yrs ago.
Samsung has the highest MTBF and I have yet to see one fail within 5 yrs, they are very quiet, very fast, averagely energy efficient, they do get quite warm, but they can take it. Some 1TB models have an annoying high frequency noise when booting, but they quiet down to almost unhearable after the bios post.
And last but not least, they are the cheapest disks around.


Nuance:

DOA's are not uncommon among any brand.
Normally one in every ten thousand disks will fail at first boot.
One in every ten thousand will fail before the 2nd yr is over.

But I had four of my own ten Maxtor's fail right after the first year, and another two were DOA.
And about 15% of my clients Maxtors failed right after the first year.
About 10% of those were DOA.

None of my clients ever had a Samsung fail within 5 yrs.

So, I guess I'm a bit biased.

 

[chuckr]

None of my clients ever had a Samsung fail within 5 yrs.

So, I guess I'm a bit biased.

That's not bias,

that's analysis...

A few days ago, I threw a new Seagate 300 into a new external enclosure -- DOA.

Threw another new Seagate 300 in, AOK, 100%.

Ya don't never know...

 

[Corpsecrank]

Interesting to hear that samsung works so well. Most of the hitachi drives I see fail are in laptops I should have mentioned that.

But a DOA I can forgive in most cases. At least there was no data on the drive and it can easily be replaced.

What really ticks me off is having a drive for just past the 30 day mark and then having it fail because when you send it back you always get a refurbished unit in return. After 30 days they are no longer obligated to replace the unit with a new one they can send a repaired drive which is never as good and does not have a full warranty.

 

[SquonkSC]

Interesting to hear that samsung works so well. Most of the hitachi drives I see fail are in laptops I should have mentioned that.

But a DOA I can forgive in most cases. At least there was no data on the drive and it can easily be replaced.

What really ticks me off is having a drive for just past the 30 day mark and then having it fail because when you send it back you always get a refurbished unit in return. After 30 days they are no longer obligated to replace the unit with a new one they can send a repaired drive which is never as good and does not have a full warranty.

For exactly that reason I buy HDD's and most of my hardware in a local shop with nice people that know me, instead of online.

I get the hardware for just a little more than the online price, and if it fails within a period of 24 months I get a new one, not refurbished, no sending to factory, and no hassle.

I'm willing to pay the extra 5% for such great service, and to keep my local retailer alive.

 

[swarfega]

WD and samsung for me.

 

[zigzag3143]

WD since seagate drives started dying on me. 5 DOA in 9 months

 

[mickey megabyte]

am i the first hitachi deathstar user?

it's nothing fancy, but it does the job, and will continue doing so for years to come...

(i hope )

 

[SquonkSC]

am i the first hitachi deathstar user?

it's nothing fancy, but it does the job, and will continue doing so for years to come...

(i hope )

Deathstar??

Freudian mistake or joke?

 

[mickey megabyte]

well, it's actually 'deskstar'

but a lot of early ones failed, so the whole brand acquired the nickname.

i rather like it and fondly call my main data partition 'deathstar'.

 

[emerald08]

We've got a Western Digital going on three years now in our desktop. It did come back w/ a three or more sectors are bad warning once. I had to wipe the drive anyway and killdisked it. It's still running and hopefully will for another couple of years!

One of my laptops has a Seagate in it. Beautifully quiet and quite nimble for W7 and linux

The other in my ancient Thinkpad T30 is a 4200 Hitachi Travelstar. It runs well enough and is probably quite old (I bought this as my first laptop from Fleabay) but gets the job done. I will definitely upgrade soon when I save up enough greens for a bigger drive

 

[hybridfan]

Samsung for me very good quality at a very reasonable price.

 

[Corpsecrank]

Years back there was a drive I used to like the quantum fireball. Those things were practically indestructible and came in cheap HPs and a few other factory machines. I had one of those for about 10 years before finally giving it away because I needed a bigger drive.

For as old as they were and as cheap they sure did hold up pretty well. I never did see one of those die.

 

[SquonkSC]

Years back there was a drive I used to like the quantum fireball. Those things were practically indestructible and came in cheap HPs and a few other factory machines. I had one of those for about 10 years before finally giving it away because I needed a bigger drive.

For as old as they were and as cheap they sure did hold up pretty well. I never did see one of those die.

FYI, Seagate bought Quantum.

And yes, those were excellent drives.

 

[Flik]

Western digital for me, I like Seagate too. Maxtor definately a no no, had a few fail over the years.

 

[pparks1]

Typically, I'm a diehard Seagate fan....although I've rarely had problems with any Western Digitals that I have ever owned.

However, I've read many a horror story about the firmware problems and such with the Seagate 7200.11 models that I shyed away from those. When i built a new computer in July, I got the 1TB Seagate 7200.12 and was very happy until I noticed that for some reason this drive had terrible access times on my Gigabyte mobo. Other drives were fine on the mobo and the Seagate was fine on other machines...just not in this instance. So, I switched instead to a Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB on my new machine and put the Seagate 1TB in my Linux machine instead.

 

[Paww]

Western Digital, did my first and only build 3 years ago and its still running strong today. They also seem to be very good value for money in terms of performance/capacity. I don't mind not having cutting edge technology so don't mind it not running at silly speeds!

 

[Element7]

My favourite is western digital at the moment. My 120Gb WD hard drive has been in use for about 4 years now and i never have had any problems with it.