Your favorite hard drive

I had to buck the trend and go for Seagate.
Years ago (remember MFM drives?) they were the only ones worth buying. There was a bad spell, where quality seemed to die (diring the 1 to 3 gig era), but I have 3 7200rpm 90 gig drives, that are outperforming most others in the same class (2mb buffer). The WD and Maxtor 8mb buffer drives are slightly faster, but seem to have a higher fail rate.
In the 100 or so hard drives I've sold in the past year, no returns on the Seagate's...can't say that for other brands.

 

I have used Western Digital Drives since way back in the days of DOS 5 and Windows 3.1

I have not had any problems.

I did lose one 20gig drive but it sure was not any fault of the HD itself. It is not a WD fault if I run without a surge protector and leave the PC on during a T-Storm.

I lost more than the HD believe me

I still have a WD 5.7gig booting a Win98 SE machine.

BillyBob

 

I voted for Seagate as I have three on them in the computer I am using now. 2 are SCSI drives (Sx910800N (9GB) ST15150N (4GB)) and a EIDE (ST380013A (80GB)) Also have used Maxtor drives in passed systems I built. Have not had any problem with either brand.

 

Western Digital Caviar WD1200BB was ordered with my new system a year ago. Very quiet, very fast. Along with reliability, fairy priced and generally in good supply at numerous locations. Business use have had 15 pc's (early/mid 90's), never had a HD failure. I know many of them were WD, but not all of them (some Seagate's and IBM's).
Update... Ooops, if you haven't figured it out, voted Western Digital.

 

Most of my drives have been WD drives. Never a problem with them so I will toss them my vote.

Mike

 

One additional thing about WD hard drives- they offer a full array of diagnostics on their website, and customer tech support is excellent. IMO, good value and a good product.

Johanna

 

Just my 2 ccents...

Big WD fan...been using them ever since I built my first PC. At work we have a full range of HD's (WD, Quantum, Fujitsu, Maxtor, IBM, and Seagate) and have found that the WD hd's fail the least with Quantum failing the most.

 

My vote was for Maxtor, but only because it came before WD in the list ... I would have cast a vote for each, but it seems that Arie will let me vote only once!

I've used hard drives from numerous manufacturers, including Fujitsu, IBM, Maxtor, Quantum, Samsung, Seagate, and WD, and the Maxtor and WD drives edged out the others, if only because they were 7200 RPM drives, while the others were 5400 or slower. The 8MB cache on my 100GB WD1000JBs also seems to make a difference, and they have a three-year warranty, while those with a 2MB cache (or those running at 5400 RPM) have only a one-year.

 

I don't know about a FAVORITE hard drive but I know I've recently had a devastating experience with a Western Digital drive.

Naturally a single experience doesn't make or break the reputation of a brand of hard drive but when I saw this thread I couldn't help but chime in.

I bought an 80gb WD hard drive (model WD800) and only about 3 days after installing it, while the drive was less than a week old, it FAILED to be recognized by any controller or in any computer except for intermittentently. Nothing was done to the drive when it stopped working; I was in the middle of using the computer when it just quit responding! I still am in the worrysome throes of trying to recover data off this drive which still is only 8 days old even as I write this. If failed so quickly that I was unable to back data up (whoever thought data would be LESS safe on the brand NEW hard drive which so recently passed all its tests).

I will try to write back in after I recover this data and see if Western Digital helps at all in the efforts to recover my data.

 

Hi Stelliger ...

Bad news, indeed, but I have a couple of thoughts. You said that the drive is intermittently accessible, so you might try mounting it as a slave, with another (good) drive as primary master. That way, when the drive does show up, you might be able to recover your data.

An acquaintance who is a full-time pro in the business suggests that you check out SpinRite, from Gibson Research. He uses it religiously, saying that it has "saved his bacon" numerous times. Two downsides, though ... it costs $89 (which might be cheap, if your data is important), and it won't work on NTFS disks. If you're FAT32, though, it might be worth checking out.

Good luck, and please let us know what happens.

 

stelliger

I had the same probelm with my first 80gig WD drive. I just took it right back to Sams and they exchanged it right there. They also stated that they did get a batch of bad ones. And hopefully they had returned tham all.

But when I was talking with a Friend about it he asked " Did you run the diagnostices from the supplyed floppy FIRST ? "

I said NO.

Apparently that checks the drive for bad spots and marks them. And sets up the front end for use. I have had no problems with the replacement.

I ran the diag and then copied the old 40gig to it and it booted just like it had always been there. And the 40gig is still mounted in this machine JUST in CASE XP does a to me.

I have purchased two 40gig WD drives since and no problems.

BillyBob

 

I have to report a very sad event for a friend of mine who has just finished building his PC and installed 2 Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160Gb drives. Both have failed within 5 days!

One of these died completely on Monday not even giving him time to backup his data and today the second on is making the same grinding noises (backing up quickly after the last time)
It's so disappointing to have spent all the time installin XP plus SP1 etc then Firewall /AV and applications to find he is going to have to start all over again. He has been very unfortunate to have this with 2 new HD's.

 

Jim,

I had hoped for that to happen (getting data off when the drive seems available). However there are a couple problems.

One, is that the only other drive I have available for this system is a 40gb drive with probably about 20gb of stuff on it. This is all on an extended partition where I cannot install and have boot NT or 2000.

The second problem is that the drive makes such short appearances so infrequently that to try to pull 30gb of data off could take weeks (not to mention timeout errors). I haven't yet been able to get the drive to work in windows. In DOS, when doing a DIR command, for example, I might wait 2 minutes, then see most of the dir, wait another 2 mins then see more.


Billybob,

I had tested the drive with dlgdiag, the WD diagnostics, initially. All was fine, I was able to format and use the drive fine for a couple days. Then BLAM. It snuck up on me. Sorry to hear about your situation. Looks like WD's 80gb drives have some known problems (which is important to this thread!) I can take it back easily enough - but it's not only the time I've wasted on this stupid this but also the data I'm in danger of losing. I'm tempted that if I have to go to a data recovery house to get my data off, that I should present WD with the bill!


MiniB,

Sorry to hear. Apparently WD isn't the only one making problematic drives!

 

Seagate!

Because its hard to beat a Cheetah! and most my systems are SCSI based.

Since Maxtor aquired Quantum they have made great advances and are one of the best values out there.

I also like WD - but they have had some quality issues in the recent past ( the percentage of those 80GB's that failed was scary! ).

Think BACKUP! and read my sigline twice!

 

I used to use Quantum as they were always rated the fastest. Then I went to IBM for the same reason. Actually had my first drive die ever...and it was an IBM. Figured it was time to try something new. So I went with Maxtor. I just happened to pick a Maxtor Diamond Plus 8 which has the fastest avg. read speed of any IDE drive I've ever had or read about - 53 MB/sec. Oddly enough, this is faster than the Diamond Plus 9 I bought...and returned.

Over the years, I've heard too many strange stories about WD to try them. With IDE-related devices like multi-drive selectors there was often the caveat, "will work with most drives except WDs ". Don't know why WD insists on having jumper setttings that are very different than every other company - it's caused quite a few extra help posts in forums over the years. I even read an article about WD having IDE compatibility problems a few years back - can't remember where or the details.

WDs performance numbers have never impressed me...until now of course. But I'm happy with my Maxtors.

With 7200rpm drives, I highly recommend everyone use a dedicated drive cooling device of some manner as these drives run very hot which, I'm guessing, could lead to premature drive failure.

 

Hi, the dedicated drive cooling was something my friend had made sure he did when building the PC. The drives are being replaced today and I think the company he purchased them from are going to have to re-call all the 160GB drives in case it is a fault in the whole batch. The code numbers were almost identical so this time he is asking for different batches. I just wonder thought how much cooling would really be required as he had 2x160BG Maxtor drives? Two fast drives would mean mega cooling not to mention the noise

 

Maxtor for me

I am happy with my Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X (thats what aida32 says it is). Very fast and very quiet.

I have an IBM in my home machine but I can't remember what model. Its been a good drive too.