Which hard drive manufacturer do you prefer?

Thanks for looking at this survey, if you want to take part please feel free to elaborate as to why you prefer the manufacturer, if not please simply participate in the poll, thanks

 

I like Samsung the best. There is some evidence for them being the most reliable. Plus they have the fastest 3.5" drive, and the cheapest 2TB drives. I even run one in my laptop too.

 

I think that big Russian survey a few months back had hitach with the least failures followed by western digital.

 

I've owned several Hitachi hard discs in the past and none of them have failed yet.

Currently working a WD (one day old)

 

My ancient Dell had a Samsung HD and it never failed me once for 5 years.

 

I think the biggest failure was for spindle bearing failure, eg noise, heat, ect.

 

Do you know a common cause for western digital failure?
I've heard good stuff about them, this is my first

 

I read that wd only secures it`s spindle at one end, and not at both like hitachi , as i said it`s only what i read on that Russian report.

 

Well, since a hard drive is a mechanical device, its destined to fail, I'm sure all products have their little niches we all associate with.

HP is famous for its laptops overheating for example because of the fan design while they offer good value for money and do build nice machines.

 

I like Samsung better!

Here is an article talking about it: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hdd-reliability-storelab,2681.html

This must all be taken with a grain of salt and is not hard evidence, but it sure is a start.

And OP, Maxtor is part of Seagate. They were merged liked 5 years ago or something like that.

 

i love seagate and wd. but i refer seagate since they have worldwide warranty. i'll say no with hitachi 'cause i have bad experience with it.

 

I like Samsung and Seagate. I've subjectively found their drivers to be quieter than the competition. Most of my SSDs are also Samsung. I don't like Hitachi that much. Most of the dead drives that've encountered over the past couple years have been Hitachi.

 

I'm still on the fence about SSD's I mean I've always been used to the ol' platter spinning around, I'd imagine being solid state means they will last much longer than a spinning plate being read by little head, but IDK maybe I'll get a SSD down the road before they become standard in the future

 

Had nothing but problems with Hitachi. Seagate drives are good but I haven't bought anything from them in 3+ years, cause of the abnormal number of failures with the Barracuda drives. Though bear in mind everything is anecdotal, as statistics have shown all drive manufacturers have the same failure rates.

I only buy WD these days.

 

When all aspects are taken into account, Hitachi drives are usually above the competition especially when O/S performance, heat and power consumption are concerned.

Of course, the Seagate XT is my favourite drive right now - cause it's the fastest (we'll see how durable it is), but of course a single drive does not a 'favourite manufacturer' make.

 

SSD are still relatively new and by definition will incur issues. It's an unfortunate, but a consequence of having the state-of-the-art.

In addition, not all SSD are a like. Their variability and operational capabilities are as broad as any components.

 

Which hard drive company offers the best warranty service. anyone?
I see Hitachi and Seagate are only 1 vote off a draw

 

seriously people use WD? those thing DOA and fail faster than any other company i have seen...along with maxtor. They also have terrible latency. Hitachi and Seagate are the only ones i can stand. Even there drives only last me 1-2 years lol

I normally don't even bother with warranties....going through the bs to replace a drive that can be bought for 60 bucks is not worth it. A 150 dollar drive 1-2 years later is like half that price by than lol ^^

 

Statistical data shows all manufacturers have the same failure rates. As anecdotal evidence, I have never had a WD or Seagate drive fail, but I haven't bought a Seagate drive in 3 years as the Barracuda drives were garbage a few years back.

Had nothing but bad experiences with Hitachi so no no to Hitachi. Plus they are cheaper than everyone else and cheap in the computing world usually equates to crap.

 

hitachi is cheaper? WD is cheaper. Seagate and hitachi are more expensive than WD....where are you getting that.....

 

Well where I work Hitachi Travelstar and Deskstar aka deathstar is always cheaper. We had a 2 TB Deskstar for 79.99 once, cheapest WD was 105.99. Also the drives that get returned the most...hrm Hitachi?

I find WD are slightly more than Hitachi and Seagate. Are you basing your pricing off Newegg mostly? I work in a retail store.

Edit I also take good care of my drives. Turn off my computer when it isn't in use, very good cooling.

 

I mostly use WD black and Seagate's including XT's in latops, WD and Samsung pretty much exclusively for my SAS drives and to the OP Maxtor IS Seagate and has been for quite awhile.

Seagate and Hitachi has been very relaiable for me as well except for a large number of hitachi 3.5" drives with motor failure in AppleTime Capsule units do to crappy cooling and in earlier revisions a bad power interface as well.

 

I vote for OC... oh wait hard drives... whoa! It's 2009 all over again! But seriously, since I remember my first computer 486 dx2 66 MHz, I remember Seagate drives being pretty quiet and reliable.

Western Digital 4GB HD I had went to repairs more than all the m11x hinge users. Combined. Near the end of its life, it was sort of working but then once in a while the drive would completely shut off. Tech support would just return it to me and claimed it works fine. So I just tried to physically trash it, in hope that they'll finally admit it doesn't work. But the damn thing just wouldn't die.... that's what I remember every time someone mentions WD. They were quite a bit noisy too.

Went with Seagate afterwards (I think the next one was Barracuda) and never had any problems again.

 

When i used to use my desktop its on 24/7. It gets turned off when it crashes lol...damn over clocks failing every 20-30 days when i play a game.

 

I don't really have a preference. I've had WD, Seagate/Maxtor, Hitachi, and Toshiba drives before. Never had a Samsung, and I haven't used a relatively modern Toshiba.

In my experience, Seagate drives have been the quietest and Hitachi the loudest, and Hitachi drives had a tendency to run hot. Obviously these comments are quite limited, since I haven't had all that much experience with different hard drives.

 

Have always had good luck with WD, and now with Intel SSDs.

 

I prefer western digital and hitachi and then samsung too

I prefer toshiba least, I have seen many many toshibas fail. I would never get a toshiba laptop just because it probably has a toshiba hd.

However I have two seagates in my laptop

seagate is the only one that has this drive on the market, and my laptop came with a seagaate 54k

I hate the drive it came with btw, it sucks

brand new but it goes into bsod mode for a while when it moves too much. Hate it.

 

Funny enough I've seen Toshiba notebooks with Fujitsu's and Seagates.

 

I've heard some pretty disparaging things about Fujitsu.

 

I think Hitachi is best at the moment. The 7K500 is one of the only two platter 7200rpm drives that doesn't make significant noise.

I don't know how big it was but Hitachi did win yes.

 

I've never had an HDD fail on me except in my old laptop which I dropped while it was running, so I just buy whatever is the cheapest. In my desktop I have 2 Seagates, in my HTPC I have a Samsung and a Western Digital, and the wife's desktop has a Western Digital. All our laptops have whatever they were sold with.

 

I've used Western Digital, Samsung, Hitachi, and Seagate HDDs. None of them have failed on me. Aftermarket I usually prefer WD, though I generally try to look for lowest price/best warranty.

I've used Intel, Crucial, and OCZ SSDs. My Crucial and OCZ drives had issues. (The Crucial probably had a problem in and of itself, but I think the OCZ drive's sandforce controller was just having issues with my chipset.)

 

Western Digital and Seagate. I love my External Western Digital 500 GB HDD. I have always trusted them

 

Historically I have always purchased Western Digital notebook drives. Earlier this year I purchased a Hitachi 7K500 and have been quiet pleased with it, both in terms of quality and performance. Much to my surprise, I bought WD's answer to the 7K500, the WD5000BEKT, and am not super happy with it since it makes a lot more noise than the 7K500. It's still a good quality drive though.

For desktop drives I have always purchased WD.

 

As an aside on externals:

I've seen every single one of them fail. I hope you have a backup for your backup?

The last pre-built external I bought was almost a decade ago. Could not fix it, could not re-use the HD inside another enclosure, could never trust proprietary 'junk' ever again.

Highly recommend a standard exclosure with the ports required (Vantec is my 1st choice) with an off the shelf OEM HDD. Or better yet, two of them.

 

I have no preference, it is what ever is the hot item at the time. I try and stay away from known issues if they are published at the time.............

 

If we're talking about externals then perhaps the results might be rather different. Just because a manufacturer makes reliable hard drives doesn't mean that they can make decent quality chassis, case or the electronics inside.

My preference for internals is WD followed by Samsung. I have a Samsung external, but I wouldn't buy a WD external

 

Western Digital. Only because I love my 640GB Caviar Black in my desktop.

 

if you want a good external get the rosewell one from newegg. It has usb2.0 and eSATA or the other one just has USB 3.0. It also has a fan to cool it.

 

Western Digital is therefore the chosen one on this forum so far!

 

Ah, but the Hitachi is the one chosen by those in the know.

 

That would depend on personal experience, of course.

In my experience, personal experience with brand failure rates dictates what consumers buy more often than not. Lots of people got burned by the Hitachi "Deathstars" in the early 2000s . . . and I wager most of them are not eager to go out and purchase another Hitachi-brand drive.
Out of the six WD drives I have purchased over the last few years, two have gone bad with a year and a half of purchasing (one within a year). 2/6 is not a good ratio in my book. I continue to buy them though; I have a suspicion that hard drive failure rates are similar across manufacturers.

 

Of course consumer choice is always dictated by their personal experience, even though it is irrational. We buy the stuff we know that works, manufacturers go out of their way to keep up their reputation.

As many family found out with cars, we bought 2 Toyota's from the 1980s and had bad experience, we only bought Honda's after that. Now funny enough Toyota and Honda are tied but my family with just those bad experiences over 20 years ago will never buy a Toyota. Now cars and computer parts maybe different but branding is very powerful indeed in the human psyche.

 

I've used Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate and some others.
the day I got my new laptop the western digital was clicking loudly and it wasn't a healthy sound, so they replaced it with a seagate, bad move? lol

 

That is actually not true at all. I've seen several Toshiba machines, and actually the majority seem to use Seagate drives.

Even external hard drives by each of these companies do not necessarily have the company's drive inside them, funnily enough. My friend's (brand new from store) Seagate external hard drive had a Western Digital drive inside it.

The cost of manufacturing hard drives is so similar and the profit margins are so slim that sometimes it is cheaper to acquire in bulk a competitor's drives rather than using one's own drives in external hard drives.

 

Well see many OEM's and manufacturers buy in the bulk. They say hey we need 4 million 1 TB drives, who can get us the cheapest. So whoever wins the bid (Samsung, WD, Seagate, Hitachi etc) gets their drives put in the enclosures/PCs/laptops for that time. Though every time they make a bid it's not always clear who wins so different batches of product may have different hard drives.

Still kinda embarrassing buying a Seagate external and finding a WD drive in there..

 

Why would that be 'embarrassing'?

I too buy from my competitors if it would cost me too much to do in $$ or time spent.

I'm sure that the external enclosure division of Seagate is separately run from the HDD manufacturing division.

 

Well people who are adamant Seagate buyers crack open their enclosure to find a WD inside. I know they are separate but hopefully the manufacturers of enclosures would have a deal where they could buy cheaper drives internally...lol

 

When a product is built to a price point, internally is not always cheaper.

 

my seagate internal 500 gig hard drive is so noisy.. its a day old and makes this low VRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR noise constantly.. its not failing but anyone else experience that?