More Reliable: WD or Seagate?

i am doing a poll for your opinions..


gonna upgrade soon....250 GB most likely.

your additional comments and advice is welcome.

also,..are there any 2.5" 7200 RPM HDDs ? ..i know Seagate momentus..but my budget aint that high as i am retiring the laptop end of this year.

 

You won't get any clear answers.
There are people who have 10 Seagates running for 10 years, the others have 10 Seagates failing in 2 months. The same with WD and every other hdd-manufacturer.
Seagate recently had the firmware-failure with their desktop-drives.
In the end, there's no really 'bad' hdd-manufacturer. You had the IBM Deathstars and though it's several years ago, people are still flaming on Hitachi.
You should just beware of disks which are known to fail, e.g. the Samsung F1 1TB-hdds weren't good some time ago, but with current notebook-hdds there should be no problem.

In my opinion: Just buy the drive that fits you better in terms of speed, access time, volume.

 

usually this is split... both are great drives manufacturer. although currently seagate is experiencing a bit of difficulty (firmware problem, as stated above).

currently
Laptop:
1)hitachi
2)WD
3)Seagate

Desktop
1)WD
2)Seagate (but i hold off from buying this generation of seagate desktop HDD)

 

i am buying for laptop..

wobble..i am surprised to see Hitachi u rated above WD and seagate..because the guy at the store told me hitachi has high failure rate...maybe he was pushing sales with higher profit margin as usual.



is WD worth the higher price?...and what is the reason for charging a higher price compared to Seagate?

 

Hitachi is the best imo. Bought, owned and sold 8 7K320s till now, all good.

After hitachi, will be WD. A 7200.2 failed on me.
Samsung is good as well.

I don't think personal opinions will help you much. Out of the 4 best companies, get the cheapest HDD. Its very rare that HDDs fail themselves. They usually get screwed up 'cause of the user. Any mechanical drive is prone to failure. There is always a chance of getting a lemon when buying electronics, no matter how good a reputation the manufacturer has. (So, I'll not vote )

 

I've used Hitachi since my first laptop back in 1999.
No problems, just one failed maybe because I moved the laptop when it was ON, back where Active Protection System on Thinkpads was not a feature.
Then last year bought a 5K320 that turned to be not so silent as it was raved by many people so I was obviously dissapointed.
So I'd say you will be OK between WD & Hitachi.
Just ordered a WD Scorpio Black for the performance (just installed Windows 7), the 5K320 then failed so I'm expecting a replacement drive soon.

IRC, WD have a 5 year warranty vs 3 year on the Hitachi's

 

In my experience, I have owned:

3 WDs
1 Toshiba
1 Hitachi

None of them have failed in 1-3 years that I have had these drives. I'll let you be the judge of what that means.

 

Warranty wise, all laptop harddrive manufacturers now have a 3 year warranty, so its a more even playing field. Seagate did drop their warranty from 5 years to 3 years.

Their are a few laptop manufacturers:
Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, Toshiba and Fujitsu

In terms of Reliability, (My opinion)
1) hitachi (0/19 failed)
2) samsung (0/5 failed)
3) fujitsu (1/8 failed)
4) toshiba (1/2 failed)
5) seagate (16/18 failed)
6) western digital (37/40 failed)

In terms of Reliability, (as most state on the forum)
1) western digital
2) hitachi
3) seagate
4) samsung
5) toshiba
6) fujitsu

I personally have had tons of problems with seagate and western digital over the years, so I switched to hitachi about 4 yrs back, and thankfully never had a problem.

K-TRON

 

K-tron, what the hell?!

Why do you have so many hard drives? Are you running a p0rn distribution ring or something?

Come now, you can't fool the Linux Badass; he knows that your complacent exterior hides those kinds of activities!

 

At home, my brother and I run a computer repair center for people at school, friends, family. We do a lot of testing of harddrives, because we donate a lot of systems to the needy. We do not ship out systems with western digital drives because of their unreliability. The first batch of 40 drives was for that reason, and when they came up DOA, and their RMA replacement drives also came up DOA, we stopped using western digital. Actually we prefer Maxtor 20-40gb drives. They are the longest lasting drives I have ever came across. We buy lots of them probably around a hundred so far, for these systems we donate.
Plus I used to have a good 23 laptops which I sold which all had IBM/Hitachi drives in them.

As of now though, the only drives in my house which we use are the Hitachi Ultrastar and Travelstar line, and the Maxtor line of drives (the old ones, since the new ones were terrible)

I cant even count how many drives we had, but the above listing is just out of memory

K-TRON

 

hey guys..i got a question..


my laptop had 1 year warranty.

the HDD is samsung. (OEM)..its having issues now..I/O errors.

do u think i can claim warranty on the HDD from samsung? (laptop is around 1.5 years old)

 

you should be able to. Samsung carries a 3 year warranty on their harddrives.

When you go to RMA a Samsung product, you have to type in the serial number and so forth. It will let you know if your drive is covered under warranty or not.

K-TRON

 

imo western. i have had VERY few wd's die. though some do make some odd noises but those are mostly the 500gb ones. they clack and tick. if it was a 500gb imo id go seagate. but anything else wd for sure

 

Hi.

I use to work for a computer company making industrial computers and amongst other we supplied the military and we only use to use WD HDD`s and we did not have any problems.

And personally for the last 10 years, i have only bought WD hdd`s and not one had a problem.

The only hdd that ever went faulty was an IBM 60GB.

I have never used Seagate and therefore will not vote in the poll.

John.

 

The poll is bad . . . . .


It really comes down to the drive model. Just as ford and Chevy have many different models of cars. Hard drive makers have several different HD models.

It would be better to ask . . . ."which IDE 320gb 7200rpm drive is better?"

But it does not really matter, no matter which drive you buy it will die three week later, for no other reason then it's YOU

 

Maybe you guys got the harddrives bad from the beginning? I know the most common thing is when the harddrives are shipped and when an accident happens, all the harddrives that was on there goes bad.
So maybe you guys went through something like that, cause having so many faulty drives from the same manufacturer, i can't see any other reason than shipping went very wrong! As we all know, harddrives are very fragile

Though i'm experiencing some problems with my current WD atm :/


EDIT: I voted for Seagate. Even though i have a WD hard drive

 

K-TRON,
What do you think about Hitachi's normal everyday user Deskstar line of drives?

 

Ive only had two deskstars. They are good drives, but for desktops I usually have 15K drives, so I cant really speak for the whole deskstar line.
My brother has a few P7K500's and they are excellent drives. The E7K1000 is also great (Its the only 7200rpm drive in the Ultrastar series). Its the fastest 3.5" 7200rpm drive. The P7K500's replaced some faulty seagate 7200.11 and barracuda ES drives.

Michel, I thought that shipping was the culprit too, so after I rma'ed them, the second batch suffered the same problems. I rma'ed a few of them a third time, and they still didnt work. So I gave up on them.

K-TRON

 

1. Hitachi
2. Wd
3. Seagate

 

On the desktop side, Western Digital's WD6401AALS and WD5000AAKS drives are currently the highest rated while Seagate is falling behind.

Notebook side though, Seagate hasn't had problems, and with as reliable as they've been over the years I'm inclined to keep recommending them.

 

here
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/notebook-hard-drive,2006-17.html

there toms hardware u got a test in everydrive and seagate wins the first place.... but very close to the WD.... they are both good but i would pick seagate. 5 years warrantly.... great speed, great power c. for ur notebook battery and strong.... will withstand shocks like crazy....

 

Seagate needs to learn how to write system firmware. Their desktop drives are basically falling left and right at this moment, and I hope for your sake that the problem does not arise on laptop hard drives either.

 

Didn't Seagate lower their warranty to 3 yrs?

 

yes they did. Probably because they have so many drives to replace, which is hurting their revenue

K-TRON

 

depends on which line you are buying with each . Seagate and WD both make excellent drives

 

i've owned WD all my life, never failed on me :] plus my dad works for WD TEHEHE