Need to upgrade, should I go with Seagate or hitachi?

I've heard that seagate HDDs are great as far as reliability goes, but I the only 120gb ULtra ATA HDD I found that anyone has in stock is a Hitachi.

I noticed that the Seagate has a 5 year manufacturer warranty versus the 3 year Hitachi.

Does anybody have any advice (or any idea where I could a 120gb seagate Ultra ATA )?

 

Hitachi are great!

 

You can't go larger than 120 GB? I like both and you can't go wrong with either.
Even though the Seagate has the 5 yr warranty, do you think you'll really be using the laptop you have in 2013?

You can't lose with either...go for the best deal.

 

seegate ROCKS!

 

Go for the 250GB Scorpio, I had a Hitachi 120GB 7200RPM before this and the Scorpio is definately the same or faster(didn't really feel a difference to be honest) but I have plenty of storage now!

 

It seems like 120gb is the highest I can get for an ultra ATA.

 

Ultra ATA = ATA 5/6 = IDE or E-IDE = PATA
I think you're just confused.

So you can get the WD Scorpio as it's the exact same interface. Infact your using a ASUS z81sp which uses the exact drive interface as my W3V.

 

My 80GB 7200rpm Hitachi IDE (aka UATA, D3X explained it) is working great

 

For ATA (also known as PATA, Ultra ATA), Seagate and Hitachi make up to 160GB drives, Western Digital makes up to 250GB drives

 

My hitachi, which has just turned 2 yrs, is in the process of slowly dieing. I'm just trying to figure out if maybe I got a lemon, but I think I'm going to go with the seagate. I prolly won't be using this laptop in 3 years, but the 3year vs. 5year warranty seems to indicate that seagate has more confidence in the reliability of their drives.

 

Although your analogy makes sense. Unfortunately, Seagates warranty is quite different. With Western Digital and Hitachi, they send you brand new drives in cases where your hard drive is deemed defective. Seagate on the otherhand sends you a factory refurb. I have yet to send a Hitachi or WD back for RMA, but unfortunately I've already had to send 2 of my Momentus drives (my 160GB is a refurb) back. Chances are, if the drive lasts more than a year it would do fine for the next few.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to say that Seagate drives are worst than others, it could so happen that I had some bad luck with them.

 

AFAIK, everyone sends refurbs these days; that includes Hitachi. I have nothing against refurbs if a company knows how to do things right; they are usually checked as rigorously if not more so than new drives. I have an 80GB 7200rpm refurb Hitachi that I bought a year ago from a ZipZoomFly with a three-year factory warranty that is running great in my Latitude C640.

Every company has one issue or another. Western Digital notebook drives (key word being notebook) are a bit slower than Seagate/Hitachi (check StorageReview.com for data). Hitachi does not offer advance-replacement RMA's; consider this if you have a drive start to fail and you wish to get your new notebook drive early to clone the old one. Seagate has had some failures with its Momentus line, at least in the MacBook Pro; user reports indicate a higher-than-average problem rate; whether this is limited to just the drives supplied MacBook Pro is difficult to determine.

For notebook drives, I'd probably go Hitachi. They've been in the mobile drive industry longer than Seagate or Western Digital, and so have had a chance to advance further in power-saving technology. Their reliability rate is pretty good. And, in my case, I can clone a failing drive over a network or back it up to DVDs (though I admit, I still wish Hitachi had advance-replacement like other companies do). Seagate would be my second choice, followed by Western Dig; I don't have enough data on Samsung to make a comment one way or the other.

 

Does Western Digital have a manufacturer's warranty on all their HDDs? It doesn't list one for the Scorpio 250mb ATA on Newegg.

 

http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp