Which 1tb HDD model to get

I want to buy a 1tb or plus single drive, but obviously there's only 1tb available at the moment, as of right now. What i'm wondering is there anything else besides the 3 following drives, such as other variants or faster versions and better design or is this that's the only thing available, looking for the best performance with high density and as well as low fault tolerance, so any known errors with the following drive's i would like to avoid.

Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD10TPVT 1TB 5200 RPM

SAMSUNG SpinPoint MT2 HM100UI 1TB 5400 RPM

TOSHIBA MK1059GSM 1TB 5400 RPM

are there any other 1tb drive's, which one would most recommend, stability is the first priority for storage, second wise would be performance, other recommendations?

 

What are you using the HDD for? External storage? Internal storage? Internal main drive (OS/programs)? These are all 12.5mm tall drives and will not fit into most notebooks.

 

i'm getting a optical caddy 12.7mm that supports 12.5mm, this is for a notebook that supports 12.5mm, and i'm just trying to figure out which model to get and if i'm missing any other models. Purely for notebook.

 

Brand doesn't matter. Warranty does.

The truth is that there is no way to guarantee that a drive will be un/reliable based on brand or model.

People will come onto this thread and tell you "I've used brand XYZ for 20 years, and they NEVER fail!" or "Stay away from brand ABC. I bought 2 of these drives, and they both failed after 2 years." But this is all anecdotal evidence... not data. Every single person on this planet could tell you to buy brand ABC. But there is no guarantee that the drive that YOU buy will be 100% reliable.

The fact of the matter is that any hard drive you buy WILL eventually fail. And when the drive does, the only thing that matters is warranty (to replace the drive) and the backups you have (to recover your data). Those are the only things that matter.

Having said that, my not-hard-data-but-anecdotal-experience has been to always buy Western Digital. Maybe it's superstition, maybe it's luck, but my personal experience has been that they tend to be reliable drives. What *IS* hard evidence is that they have a great warranty / RMA policy, including cross-shipping RMA's that originate from the United States (no 4-week wait for overseas RMA's). That alone should be enough motivation to buy Western Digital.

 

@somep3ople
Hi
I got samsung 1TB and its very good its quiet no clicking no stupid noises ..
but my enclosure is slim so i had to remove converter PCB out and now its perfect

 

+9999999 lol

I to second this. I find WD are more reliable than other manufacturers, but that and their RMA process and warranty is very good, though personally I have never had to RMA a failing drive as WD has not failed me yet!

 

@kent1146

Yes that is true all platters and all heads and all drive bodies are developed in one existing big factory and all those brands wd seagate samsung hitachi toshiba fujitsu and ETC all are ordering from there and paying factory people for they work ..
so it's the same with laptops, everything is ordered from one big factory ..

 

Here's a bench of the Toshiba, for comparison.

 

I would not get the toshiba.

I dont care what anyone says toshiba hard drives are terrible.

I wish it was just my experience but look at all the reviews on newegg itself.

This drive died within a year.. All models all sizes. Theres nothing to that?

I had two die within a year.

I would get the samsung

 

How recent was that? Toshiba took over the Fujitsu HDD business a couple of years back and the Toshiba HDDs that I have bought since then seemed to be cooler and quieter than before, which has me wondering whether some Fujitsu HDD engineering goes into the current Toshiba HDDs. The clue may be in the country of manufacture. My 750GB Toshiba MK7559GSXP is made in Thailand.

John

 

AFAIK HDD production has not reached that point where its all made by one company. Though as time goes by it probably will.

 

I think Musuta was being facetious.

 

i was leaning towards samsung to begin with, and yes it does count about the stories you hear aka 7200.10 with seagate, had physical errors, so i was wondering more about something like that. comparing it to the WD both have same warranty length and samsung is slightly faster, just wondering if it to has a higher failure rate based of user experience

 

That is not useful information so don't worry about it.

 

What you hear is only a small fraction of the drives sold, so IMO user experiences aren't that important as they do not represent the average failure rate.

 

@Trottel
stop trolling and write something wise and to the thread ...
thnx

 

Wise? So what do you call this:

And sorry, but anecdotes from a handful of users is no measure of a drive's reliability.

 

Actually each and every brand of hard drive manufactures their hard drives in a factory they own.

However... The parts they purchase to make them can definitely be from the same channel.

Its like a mazda and a honda will use hitachi starters. They werent made in the same factory but they take advantage of the same parts channel and can often use the same parts.

A part like a platter could definitely be purchased from the same place bother ways.

Next the manufacturer is the engineer of the product. They can definitely build them lousy on purpose.

I do not believe toshiba hard drives are bad because of incompetence I believe they desire them to die right on time.

 

well i wouldn't say it's not important look at the seagate problem 7200.10 how is that not important it was pretty much vital, anyways just to summarize it all up those 3 models are the only 1tb models correct nothing else exists? different versions?

 

What they own is PCB board in HDD which controls HDD

 

platters are all the same in all HDDs so why they would bother to make all brands individually all of them have agreement and there is one place to make all kinds of platters ..

and body they have made as well in series in som factory . maan wake up

 

Wake up? It sounds like you're the one who needs to stop dreaming. Where do you come up with this?

 

Platters obviously aren't the same, which is readily visible when you get into areal densities of the platters. There's a reason why Seagate has had the only 750 GB 9.5mm drive out for half a year out or longer; they're the only ones that have managed to squeeze 375 GB onto a single 2.5" platter (so you can have 2 platters to get 750 GB total). Hitachi and WD have finally announced 750 GB drives of their own... if everyone had access to 375 GB platters, they would have made their own 750 GB drives long before now.

 

I have not seen a consumer report that shows the brands are all similar.

In fact the only reliability of notebook drives from a reliable article, which i was linked to here on notebookforum.com was a russian study that
claims that hitachi is the most reliable brand followed by western digital and samsung

And that toshiba is the least reliable brand. seagate was lower middle.

If you rely on consumer reviews like on amazon or on newegg.com they will tell you that hitachi and western digital are the most reliable brands

and that toshiba is the worst.

Vibration is the number one cause of early failure.

This all brands are the same is based on forum speak and people quoting eachother.

Look at 400 reviews of the wd black and 400 reviews of any toshiba model and pull your head out of the sand.

Brands improve and fall over time

 

The bolded point is exactly why all the current HDD manufacturers are on average about the same reliability. If any one manufacturer consistently got lower reliability quarter after quarter, they'd be out of business. 800 hard drive reviews is nothing considering each company ships out hundreds of millions of HDDs a year.

 

Exactly and that is why they have quiet agreement to keep balance and good friendship between each other HDD manuf.
Good thing is that there are not many of them so they run business equal ..
milions end users (especially females) they are not bothered what HDD has got in their laptops.. if the laptops are produced in series they might have agreement (HDD manuf.) that same amount of HDDs from each manufacturer will be installed in any laptop brand ..
when fujitsu finished with siemens (laptops) they stopped with HDDs and sold division to toshiba and focus to produce servers , switches , storages and network
same as the IBM they used to make HDDs but they finished with it and their main frame is servers,network and internet fujitsu started do the same ..

 

This theory is based on logic and no known data.

You are trying to convince based on some theories that make sense to you.

The truth is, Seagate has for several years been the best selling brand and been middle on reliability because they reach the market faster.

too many factors can keep an unreliable brand on the market and it doesnt matter.

The truth is most sales and consumers dont know or care.

The market for toshiba replacement part hdds versus wd is shrinking every year because that consumer isnt so stupid. But the sales to oems dont matter.

 

Where is any data showing these hard drives are all similar in reliability?

Or are you claiming data is impossible because there are so many, and we must just use logic that they must all be the same.

There is nothing to go on about hard drive reliability other than what smart people decide makes the most sense?

What? Please waste nobody elses time with this crap.

400 people who decided to review the wd black of the 1000s that bought them. 20 said it failed early.

Of toshiba models, 1 in 4 bothered to write in that it failed early.

Your random chance of getting a bad one is not 1 in 4 but its a strong indicator.
you have data that is a strong indicator that shows you the brands are different on one hand

And you have some all cars are the same so buy a buick logic on the other hand. Yet anyone who has ever reviewed consumer data on ANY PRODUCT YOU CAN BUY has never found that they are all the same.

Never been the case for microwaves to digital cameras how can hdds be magically all the same?

Whatever how can i respectfully just say get real

All brands are the same after 5 years? ( based on no data but what makes sense to you?) Well who cares. Were talking about right now.


PS I have a degree in economics and I once worked for seagate a long time ago.

 

I don't agree with Musuta that parts from every company's HDD come from the same source, but as Trottel and I have previously stated, the numbers you are referring to are insignificantly small and thus cannot be used as an accurate representation of the entire population of HDDs from each company.

You said it yourself, all companies improve their products and while in a certain time frame, company X might have "better technology" or a "faster drive" than company Y, maybe in the next generation, company Y will exceed company X. Occasionally, a company releases a model that has a higher rate of errors than other lines, every company has had at least one crappy product at some point in time - Hitachi Deathstar, Seagate 7200.10, etc. But overall, all companies have similar reliabilities on AVERAGE. You should know this since you have a degree in economics, and I assume have taken at least a few courses in statistics.

 

where is data that claims that overall all companies have similar reliabilities on average? First just state this is based on my or someone elses opinion that sounds good to me, nobody needs to think about it after that point.

It would be the first product to achieve this miracle in the history of consumer products.

Produccts change from year to year. For instance, mercedes made before 84 are very reliable, and then from 84-96 terrible.

Hondas up and down. Nissans before renault are more reliable than after. So you are bringing up a valid point that people who bought mercedes back in the day love them but they havent tried one out lately. No brand is perfect forever. The next step you are making is the error. Because brands change that means they are all the same?


Yet some sort of miracle for all cars to even out after a certain amount of years is preposterous. All reliable makes turn lousy and all unreliable makes turn better.

No it is ridiculous. If its even relevant to what youre purchasing TODAY which its not, but who cares because it doesnt even apply to the five or ten years in this fantasy market.

You are describing a statistical miracle beyond immaculate conception.

consumer products are actually tested and rated by the japanese government. Also in the uk.
Here in the us the land of consumer ignorance the closest thing we have is the non profit organization called consumer reports.

Pick up a copy of consumer reports either an almanac or even a compendium of of a single product and come back to me with a product that they tested as being equally reliable ever in the history of their testing of anything.

 

Results And Conclusions : Study: A Look At Hard Drive Reliability In Russia


heres a good article to at least start to have an educated opinion to start from.

This describes some of the manufacturing differences between different makes.

It definitely shows hitachi and western digital is the way to go from this data from about a year ago.

Certain models will be better and worse but what this data will show you without a doubt is that

THE DIFFERENT HARD DRIVES FROM THE DIFFERENT MANUFACTURERS ARE NOT THE SAME AND ARE NOT MADE IN THE SAME FACTORIES OR EVEN THE SAME COUNTRIES.

This is undeniable.

ALL THE HARD DRIVES HAVE DIFFERENT DESIGNS AND DIFFERENT LIFE SPANS

MANY COMPETING DRIVES FAIL TWICE AS MUCH AS OTHER ONES FROM DIFFERENT MANUFACTURERS

ALL NOTEBOOK HARD DRIVES BEING THE SAME IS A SPECIOUS ARGUMENT REPEATED BY SEVERAL PEOPLE WHO ARE IGNORANT DO NOT PASS IT ON.

If you are interrested the next thing I would list is googles recent study that shows hard drives fail 12 times as often as manufacturers claim.

Or something like 1 in 20 dont make it so this will affect your purchase way more often that you suspect.

 

No I have never seen such data because it does not exist.

There are huge differences in reliability between every single competing model on the market and have been since the hard drive industry began in the 70s. It has never been close.

This story going on in your head about one bad model one year and then the next another but it all ending up being the same is not the story the industry followed but one you just made up or are quoting from someone who just made it up.

 

The problem is even taking a single HDD model from a single manufacturer yields noticeable variation - you know statistically, every object has a range of values and we're examining one variable (reliability). Take this and compare every HDD made from every HDD model from every manufacturer and the amount of variance between these drives is huge. You cannot guarantee that for example every Hitachi drive currently made is more reliable than every Seagate. You cannot even do that with a specific model, ie. 7K500 vs. 7200.11. While certain models have been known to have more defects (examples stated in my previous post), you can't extend that to the company itself. Because of this fact, your "reliability data" is useless in predicting current HDDs reliability. So in the end, it doesn't matter what drive you pick - hence why I say on AVERAGE they're all about the same.

No need to be childish with the caps and multiple posts. And btw please read your own link, it is explicitly stated that their tests might not represent the HDD industry as a whole as their data comes from a small supply of HDDs and you should note that afterwards, for their recommendation to the average consumer, they do not make a recommendation for any specific model but to say that each model is different and to monitor your own drive:

" It's only the case in this study, which we've already said several times is extremely limited. With that said, research data covering the hard drive market is sparse, which is why this study remains interesting."

"Using anti-vibration parts (like rubber grommets) when mounting the hard drive, monitoring its temperatures, using adequate cooling, and handling it carefully can make a big difference in reliability and durability."