The big HDD poll!

mickey megabyte said:

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?

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'.

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 :)

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

Corpsecrank said:

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.

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

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.

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!