Hard Drive Advise

With another hard drive failure today, I'm again in the market for a new one. However, the fact that 3 out of the 4 Seagate 7200.11 drives that I bought in the last year have failed (and the outlook for the fourth doesn't look too rosy either), caused me to veer away from Seagate.

I bought 3 WDC 1002FAEX of which 2 already have bad sectors, which I bought ~ 6 months ago, and I haven't had time to check the third, so that is still a question mark. In fact, the only 2 hard drives on my desktop that checkout okay are a couple of old Maxtors (one 6 years old & one 5 years old) and of course, my 2TB which is also the newest.

Need I say that I'm getting a bit gun shy at this point, and I would like to feel that there is a good chance of buying something that would last it's warranty period. I don't need anymore of the large drives...maybe a 500GB or two would do the job. I would like to have something more than speculation if possible, because that is what caused me to buy these lemons.

the samsung spinpoint f3 drives are highly popular, recommended, well priced and fast!

Google did a study several years ago of thousands of drives, but they did not reveal brand names unfortunately. The data would probably be outdated anyway.

About all anyone can do is offer personal experience and I don't know how much good that would do you. No reader of this thread is likely to have personal experience with a statistically significant volume of drives in a controlled study.

My opinion for what it is worth:

Occasionally there are drives that would appear to have design defects that cause them to fail more often than random chance would dictate. Examples would be IBM Deskstar and possibly the Seagate 7200.11 series.

That aside, randomness overwhelms personal experience. I'd dearly love to know the details of any large-scale study that mentions brand names and model numbers, but I don't know of any such study that has leaked to the public.

The Google study that did not mention brand names did validate the "bathtub curve" of failure--i.e. failures tend to come early or late. If you get past the initial stage, the drive will likely last a long time. I haven't looked a it recently, but I think it also did NOT validate some commonly held assumptions regarding the effect of heat.

I've personally never had a drive failure, but my sample size is a puny dozen or so and signifies nothing. I can tell you that the Samsung 7200 rpm drives I have owned have tended to be quieter and cooler-running than the competition, but I can't say how important that is generally or to you specifically.

I currently use WD, but only because they were rated among the fastest at the time of purchase. If I'm not mistaken, recent Samsungs are quite fast also.

I'd be very surprised if you get any information that rises above personal anecdotes or speculation.

Good luck. It appears you have had bad luck, but I'm not sure you should draw conclusions from your experience.

I appreciate the input, and will definitely consider both of your responses, but it appears that the hard drive question how gotten pushed to the back burner, because right after posting this question, my desktop BSODed and will not now boot at all. I'm about to start a new thread for that, if you will take a look.

I posted in your other thread about Major (when are they not Major) BSOD.

It might be that your problem with this final failure, BSOD, has some baring on all the HDD failures and corruption you've had.

Not sure if the same system was in use with the BSOD but if it was then I'd look at the memory/motherboard as the ROOT cause of all of this.

I've been using Seagate drive for years and so far IIRC have never had one fail. Still using 4 of them that I bought 4 years ago. Used them in 2 different systems that were overclocked. Still using them in the original system and 2 of them, on and off depending on what OS I want to boot, in my new build.
I may even have 1 or 2 in a OLD system that has been running 24/7 for the last 6+ years. Yeah just checked and I do have 1 Seagate drive in that system.

western digital black

Just a note.
You pay your money and you take your chances.
I once, about 8+ years ago, got a WD drive that was marked 320GB (IIRC, although 8 years ago it could of been smaller), a very expensive drive at that time, and when I installed it only 250GBs was usable. Why because it was a 250GB drive. It had been mis marked at the factory. I then had to SEND it to WD, wait for them to check it and then send me the right drive. Total time about 2.5+ weeks.

I didn't buy another WD drive until recently. And only then based on Price. Seagate was like 30 bucks more for the same size.