[jcarle]

Let's make this the definitive thread on hard drives. Let's debate, argue and exchange all our personal experiences, thoughts and opinions regarding current manufacturers of hard drives.

I kept the poll down to the top 3 hard drive manufacturers because those are the ones that are the most significant in the current market.

[Slimy]

It's not that I trust WD the least, I just don't see the point of dishing out the extra cash

[sylvianorth]

Had 2 Maxtors, both made horrid noises, one broke causing me to lose tons of data.
Only had seagate since, no problems at all.

[tain]

I never met a Maxtor that I liked. Had lots of good luck with WD; Seagate to a lesser extent.

[jcarle]

I got scared off of Seagate when I had to RMA a batch of about 30 different 40GB and 60GB hard drives... mind you, that was out of a lot of several hundred, but still... Western Digital is the only company I've never sent an RMA to. I'm perplexed on how people have come to distrust a company I trust so much, or the inverse, how people can trust so much a company I distrust so much. I guess it's like all things in life, personal experiences make it hard to change your mind.

[CoffeeFiend]

jcarle, on Dec 21 2006, 12:51 AM, said:

I got scared off of Seagate when I had to RMA a batch of about 30 different 40GB and 60GB hard drives... mind you, that was out of a lot of several hundred, but still... Western Digital is the only company I've never sent an RMA to. I'm perplexed on how people have come to distrust a company I trust so much, or the inverse, how people can trust so much a company I distrust so much. I guess it's like all things in life, personal experiences make it hard to change your mind.

I guess it comes from mixed experiences. I've never had to RMA a single seagate drive EVER. And very few from maxtor/samsung/thosiba/hitachi/etc. Then there's the obvious ones I've seen LOTS of - not really the more known bad series like 5 platter "deathstars" - but things like the notoriously bad batches of fujitsus that resulted in a class action lawsuit (we're measuring by the full triwall of bad HDs here). And besides those bad batches, the only brand we've had significant problems with is WD. Be it by total # of bad drives or percentage (bad/total) or anything, they lose on all metrics. It's bad enough that we ensure that the new PCs we buy don't have WD drives in 'em (and we buy them by the pallet). So yeah, I don't trust my data to any WD drive, and will take ANYTHING over it. After seeing so many bad WDs, there's no way I could possibly trust them (it's not just one or two bad series like the fujitsu or "deathstars"). It's certainly not a few ppl on an forum that have seen 2 bad maxtors in a lifetime (hence they must suck!) or such that will make me change my mind. From anecdotal evidence, extremely low sample sizes making these statistically meaningless, when it's not actually the user's fault the drive died (cooling problem or such), and plain luck/bad luck (on a low scale), it's hard to attach much relevance to these.

As for the best/most trusted brand, I picked seagate for lack of more comprehensive options ("almost anything"), but it's a good drive, good value, good performance and all.

As for the totally untrusted one, I guess everybody can tell...

[jcarle]

@crahak:
You don't happen to remember which drives you had problems with? 120GB? 2MB cache? I do remember there being issues with the 120GB and unrelatedly that 2MB drives were rebranded maxtors...

[CoffeeFiend]

Like I said, it's not any single batch/size. From pretty old stuff (as far as corporate PCs go) to the new-ish. Just not the very latest, as we're stopped buying that particular brand a little while ago.

[LLXX]

jcarle, on Dec 21 2006, 12:33 AM, said:

@crahak:
You don't happen to remember which drives you had problems with? 120GB? 2MB cache? I do remember there being issues with the 120GB and unrelatedly that 2MB drives were rebranded maxtors...

I think those were the BBs.

I have a pair of WD1200JB and they've been fine for 2 years of continuous operation.

[jcarle]

LLXX, on Dec 21 2006, 04:34 AM, said:

jcarle, on Dec 21 2006, 12:33 AM, said:

@crahak:
You don't happen to remember which drives you had problems with? 120GB? 2MB cache? I do remember there being issues with the 120GB and unrelatedly that 2MB drives were rebranded maxtors...

I think those were the BBs.

I have a pair of WD1200JB and they've been fine for 2 years of continuous operation.

Yea, BB would be a 2MB cache drive. Unfortunately, it seems that the 2MB drives were not really up to be the most reliable drives. Personally, I've only ever bought 8MB drives for that reason.

[Lost Soul]

TAiN, on Dec 20 2006, 11:10 PM, said:

I never met a Maxtor that I liked. Had lots of good luck with WD; Seagate to a lesser extent.

ive had good luck for years with wd also

[mad_dog369]

Some time in 2004 I got my hands on a office pc specs were, 128 ram, 1.2 GHz Intel, 20gig hdd, don’t remember the mother bored( the mother board had died)

the Hdd had no branding on it and the serial code is just zero's and it's really heavy and feels solid, no hdd programmes can get a clear name from the hdd and it has never had data corruption nor loss and has never crashed oh yeah did I mention it is pretty dam quiet even when scanning with an a.v, it sits in my old pc in my room that I use every now and then.

P.s had bad luck with WD and only ever owned 1 Maxtor that also died within the first month owning it.

This post has been edited by mad_dog369: 21 December 2006 - 04:14 PM

[ripken204]

i equally trust WD and Seagate, i hate maxtor.

[Maleko]

Well, i trust both Seagate and WD as much, but use Western Digital atm, so voted WD as my trusted, Maxtor- least...

had most problems with maxtors, the onyl ones ive had to have replaced.

[Tarun]

I've had several WD's just die on me or have bad sectors out of the box. Never had a single issue with any Seagate HDD's ever.

[deda]

Maxtor = Seagate since May,22.

[sonu27]

I trust WD the most cuz I bought a new My Book ext. HDD, I haven't tried the others, but Maxtor I heard can be unreliable.

[jcarle]

I'll say one thing, even if I trust WD over all others, Seagate still has the crown when it comes to capacity and perpendicular recording.

[Incroyable HULK]

Here is my two cents:

In the last 3 years, I bought exclusively Seagate Hard Drives (SATA) from many series 7200.7, 7200.8, 7200.9, 7200.10 and recently the Barracuda ES series.
I never had ANY drive to return out of 200 except for 1 drive that didn't pass a week-en long Burn-In-Test but this could have been caused by handling, etc.
So no DOA, no RMA at 99.5%

Buying Western Digital is kind of a lotery. I remember there was at least 3 or 4 different configuration (platter, density, etc.) for their 200Gb SATA drive BUT being tagged all the same (same part number regardless of the configuration of the drive). I find theses practices innaceptable.
On a positive side I'd like to thank Western Digital for being the first and still the only company to manufacture a 10K RPM SATA Hard drive (since they don't make SCSI drives they don't fear loosing sales in this branch).

As for Maxtor I didn't touch them for a long time... I had a failed 6Gb many years ago. I sold many of them in the retail (before and after they bought Quantum) and it was ok... a bit noisy but ok.

You forgot to add Hitachi (IBM), Samsung, Fujitsu and Toshiba to your list!


Remember that EACH of theses manufacturer had at least one bad series to their record (a series of drive where failure rate is more than 25%)!

Keep in mind when choosing a disk drive is that the less heat they generate, the better durability you get.

Now bring me some SSD (Solid State Drive)!

[bonestonne]

hmmm, yes, where is Hitachi?

I've had a Maxtor for 5 years, worked flawlessly...gave it to a friend because he needed a new HD, still works flawlessly. however, there have been 4 maxtors in this house out of 4 computers. 1 has died completely. that gives a 25% failure to me.

now i'm running a pair of Hitachi Deskstars, a 40GB , and an 80GB..out of the 3 months of having them and many many installs, not a single problem, even in my school, i've never seen a problem with a hitachi.

WD...wellll. we have a new one, my dad insists its dead, i know its not, i wont go into that one. i had a 60GB WD drive, it died within a week of me getting it. now i have this old 13GB WD drive, i plan on making a dedicated Linux box with it, we'll see how long it lasts after that.

Seagate...haven't had one to myself. i've used a pair of SCSI drives made by them and not had a problem, therefore Seagate and Hitachi are very close in my eyes. Maxtor is risky, use it at your own risk, and WD is the same as Maxtor, but with a lower failure rate out of the total number of drives i've worked with.

my preference lies with hitachi.

almost forgot Fujitsu...i've got a little 6GB one that i use to test hardware with this computer, hasn't failed me yet, and its years old...i just don't like it because of its very small capacity. however i've never used a toshiba drive, so i can't say anything.

This post has been edited by bonestonne: 07 January 2007 - 11:54 AM