Your favorite hard drive

I have been very happy with my Seagate and WD drives, both 60 & 80 Gig.The worst experience I had was with 5 -IBM Deskview 40GB Drives. They replaced them and they again crashed for no reason. Real garbage. I used to use Maxtor. Their RMA policy was good at one time. They then changed it and it became difficult to return to them, even with their 3 yr. Guarantee. They all love to take the money. They sort of bleed when they have to return some.

 

Well I don't know much about hard drives. Mine is a Western Digital 30 GB UATA/100 Caviar. I've had it for 2 years. It's run with Win98 SE and WinXP Pro. I guess it's an OK drive, but I really don't know that much.

 

Hello All

My vote is for Western Digital. I have a 160 GB WD 1600JB & a 30 GB WD 307AA in my main pc.

I have had to replace 8 Quantum drives in our IBM desktops at work over the last 2 years. I have replaced every one with a Western Digital. We have some boxes doing data collection on the shop floor with 10 year old WD drives still going. The Quantums seemed to make it to "Out of Warranty" and expire. (Yes the 10 yr olds get a daily backup) We have 2 PCs with Maxtor drives still going strong at 5+ years old.

Unless I start seeing problems, I will stay with WD.

Bill

 

This may be of interest if you feel heat may be affecting your HDD.
HDD Temperature Pro

 

I now have lost TWO WD hard drives in the course of several weeks, prematurely.

One a week old, the other 2 years old.

I don't put a lot of faith in their reliability.

However - you sometimes can get them very cheaply, so that may be worth it, as long as you make sure to KEEP EVERYTHING BACKED UP!!!

 

I have to go with Seagate

I've had two WDs and a Fujitsu go bad on me. I've had three WDs with out a problem but, when I upgraded me systems here, I bought two Maxtor 80 gig h/ds. One of them started making terrible noises when it started cold. After a minute or so it would get quite. I ran diag on it and it says it's fine, but I had Maxtor replace it anyway. Now the other one has started making the same noises,so here we go again. I've always heard good things about Maxtor untill I bought these, now I keep hearing stories like this one. I guess next time I'll go with Seagate.

 

Gotta disagree with you somewhat PeteC.

1064 views seems to show a favorable amount of interest.

The lack of votes could be due to people like myself. I've only used one hard drive and have nothing to compare it with. So a vote from myself would seem rather impartial.

I used this AMD for six years now and when I scandisk I have never had an error. No problems with it whatsoever. Yet.

But I do like to read this thread to see what others say to get a headstart on my next purchase.

 

Oh boy, did I blow it

I just went and read my post to find a stupid typo.
I Should have said "I've had two Seagates without a problem ".

 

i work with seagate for a couple of years now and never had a problem with them, i had some problem with other brands but never with seagate so, i think it desearves my vote

 

Had to put a vote up for Samsung because their new drives are excellent - great tooling, special bearings and phenominal performance with solid reliability. Also have nothing but praise for WD, Maxtor and IBM, but am seeing quite a few Hard Drive failures these days - Fortunately, all of the major mfg's are excellent re: RMA's. Have been trying to stay primarily with 8mb cache drives since the warrantee changes of last year. Favorite? - WD Raptor - 5yr warrantee, 10,000rpm, 5.6ms seek speed - unfortunately, its a serial drive so its not an option for a lot of systems.

 

WD800JB

Maybe I goofed.
I read the WD instructions first , and then followed them to a successful completion. Have had no problems since I built the current system.

And as Johanna said:

That's the biggest reason I went the WD route.

 

Western Digital got my vote, 2 WD400BBs in this, and
Honorable Mention to the Samsung SV4084H that's given me 3 years of no-hassle performance in another box.

 

I think I have to buck the trend. I used to work for a Computer manufacturer so had a good chance to see the replacement/fault reports and figures for different disks. My feeling is that all manufactures have good and bad drives. For example the Seagate 1 Gb IDE (sorry forget the exact model) drive was a cracker. Very fast for the time and very reliable. The 1.2 Gb was a dog. Same with the 2.1 and 2.5 respectively.

The problem is with such a competetive market, manufacturers have to keep innovating and changing to keep up. Occasionally this means they get it wrong. The test then is what they do if your disk does fail and the support they give. For example, I have only ever got excellent support from Seagate whatever the drive.

I've had few problems with any hard drive I've bought in the last few years. I find that hardware has so outpaced software that spending time searching for a particular piece of hardware isn't as rewarding as it used to be (or am I just getting old).

 

WD used to be my favorite, but in the past two years, I've had at least 1/4th of the WD drives in my systems fail. I've bought from different PC mfg's all had WD drives and lots of dead disks. I just can't buy WD anymore with this kind of track record. For home, I bought a Seagate 120GB SATA drive and installed a SMART drive monitor. The monitor is showing problems and now I'm not so sure about this drive. I'll be buying two more, but this time I think I'm going to try Hitachi's. Hopefully I'll have better luck.