Hard Drive Brand Quality

I'm looking to put together a 3.5" 500 gig external drive, and I was wondering what peoples experiences are with the current brands that are out there. I have no idea of the quality of HD manufacturers anymore.

The current drive I am looking at gettting is a7200rpm Seagate 500Gig SATA2.

Anyone have any major problems with Seagate? Its mainly going to be used as a backup/storage drive.

 

Seagate is very reputable, all their hard dirves also comes with a 5 years warranty.

 

Seagate, Hitachi and Western Digital are the big 3, all w/good reputations.

 

alright. sounds good. Its just been a long while since i have had to buy a harddrive, that i didn't know if companies like had worsened their QC at all.

 

Seagate blows, every harddrive I have owned of theirs has had problems within the first year. They used to be good about 7 years ago, but since then they have lost ground to Hitachi. Hitachi makes a far better product. They only have a three year warranty, but literally I have never needed to send one back. I have never had any problems with them. Western Digital on the other hand, just makes crap. They really do not check their drives before shipping them from the factory. Out of about 20WD's, I think only one of them lasted more than 1 month. They are BS, dont buy into the hype of the mybooks, they are bad.
Go with your own enclosure, and get a hitachi deskstar and you will be fine.

K-TRON

 

yeah i was planning on my own enclosure, only way to have firewire, usb, and esata.

the only problem is that the place i go to for parts is limited selection for brands (but they have awesome prices).

 

Well I have a Hitachi Travelstar myself, in notebook and one in an enclosure. So far so good

 

If I had to vote, Hitachi I have 5400rpm internal, I have a WD 7200rpm external and it has worked fine. I have never owned a Seagate. K-Tron you have had very bad luck, it is beyond what anyone will experience with WD. But I agree Hitachi. I think Seagate is a good choice and would work fine. We all have our own good and bad experiences but overall Seagate is liked by many.

 

wow you went through 20 hds and 19 of them were bad. I'm surprised that you still have any data left to back up! do you by any chance work for hitachi?

 

No I dont work for Hitachi, I have a beowulf cluster, and I replaced the drives with identical WD's, and it happened that all of them were crap.

K-TRON

 

ANY hard drive can die. I give the nod to drives that back it up with a 5 year warranty. Finding a quality enclosure can be a hassle these days. I keep my 1,500 CD collection on two 500 gig SATA Seagate's, no problems other than goofy vertical metal case and worthless electronic switch. I've seen the 500G USB, only, version for $80 @CC when on sale.

 

You're probably just unlucky enough to happen to buy a bad batch...

 

You either damaged the drives yourself in same way through possibly ESD damage, shock damage, or overheating them if you had them in a large configuration without proper cooling or they were damaged in transit to you. It's remotely possible that you somehow got ahold of a bad batch if you bought them all at once from the same place and they were manufactured around the same time but 19 out of 20 drives dieing in a months time is extremely rare. I probably wouldn't rank Western Digital first in terms of drive longevity but they're pretty well as good as the rest. Seagate and Hitachi are probably the two brands that I buy most often. Unless things have changed recently though in warranty terms Hitachi doesn't offer advanced replacement like Western Digital and Seagate do.

 

Ha ha! If there is a manufacturing defect likely to demonstrate prior to 5 years, that is a marketing gimmick that costs them almost nothing. Also if they fail how is that guarantee going to help you? Read it! It does not guarantee your DATA! Seagate's might be great but your comments about their 5 year guarantee are....... wait let me stop! Don't want to get banned. Not worth the paper they are written on for what you say.

 

Did I say it guaranteed your data? I said ANY drive can fail. This is, "HA HA" why i have TWO drives.

Chill!

 

You did say what you said. And it had a spin. I simply wanted to put a spin on it. Do not come back and pretend like you did not imply anything I addressed. I will chill! But think the foundations of your thoughts are flawed, which by the way I addressed. Now here is a quote.

Warranty/guarantee? Who really wants to argue about that? I put out what I thought, I did not mean to offend, if you were, I am sorry, but don't jump back on me, chill! I think the 5 Year "warranty" vs 3 years is the biggest bunch of crap in the business. I neither have the time or interest in explaining why as I find it to be common sense. I don't know, hmm they have to give one because they are so bad? Anyway I am chilled I gave my input. I would never buy on a warranty unless lifetime vs a year or three.

 

I think Powerpack had it in his post;

Seagate, Hitachi and WD are the gold standard even if people have personal experiences that are otherwise.

I like Hitachi/IBM drives personally and will be adding a 200GB to this Fujitsu once the internal cage arrives.

But I've owned all 3 myself ineternal and external Seagates & WDs, and never had a major issue. At work though I've seen our office churn through a ton from a different types. The only ones I would recommend against are Maxtor, and that was pre-buyout.

Like I said I like Hitcachi but we got caught with a few defective Desktars years ago so I don't think any company has a completely clean slate, the thing is to buy based on current widespread reliability not a small sample.

 

Which is exactly why i asked for opinions, I haven't followed hard drives for a long time and am totally out of it in regards to quality.

I have a WD that I bought several years ago that is still going strong, although I am kinda worried about it has it has nearly 3 years of run time on it, and another drive that was a little older died at ~3 years of run time. But the one that died was some weird brand.

 

Well of the recent PCs at work the only one we sent back last year was a Dell Optiplex GX520 whose Seagate 7200.9 started grinding. But that's out of about 200 PCs about 50 of which were GX520s, the rest are older machines like the GX280 with the 7200.7 with no issues, and then before that we had a bunch of IBMs including a ThinkCenter with one of those Deskstars going down, which was mission critical gov't stuff that required an expensive forensic recovery. But considering we had more IBMs than we've had DELLs sofars (which are a combo of 7200.9, 7200.7, and then older Maxtors), I'd say they are all pretty good from our experience, but from personal experience with friends Maxtors have a higher failure rate, so maybe avoid any cheap Seagates now that they own them.

 

Hitachi FTW. That's all I have to say.

 

No offense to anyone but well, all you get is opinions. Your question has been beaten to death on this forum for quite a while, do a search. Problem is no one gets to see the return rate failure on any of the top drive manufactures. But we have lots of opinions Now, that said who here works in a large company doing IT?

I choose the guys with a five warranty only because you have a bit of satisfaction if it gives it up in four years. Seagate replaced one bad case on one my free agent drives due to bad SCSI card.

I'm in no way saying Seagate is better than the rest. In our company we have replaced them all, desktops and laptops. This is why I keep two drives for my personal stuff.

Cheers!

 

well, i've had 4 HDDs so far:

1. seagate 40gb 3.5'' 7200 rpm - died in 2.5 years
2. WD 80gb 3.5'' 7200 rpm - sold it with the rest of my old desktop but its still working and its very fast.
3. my notebooks seagate 5400.2 100gb - excellent drive, very quiet, very fast and rarely heats up past 35C
4. Seagate 3.5'' 7200.10 250gb in a cheap vantec enclosure - i store all my data on it