Who makes the best hard drives?

[Galactus]

Well my kids destroyed another computer, or something happened but now I have a hard drive with a bad sector that is toast for me. I believe this one lasted maybe 2 or 3 years. Not sure if that is the normal lifetime or not but seems mighty quick to me. Anyway I am getting a new drive and wonder which brand has the better track record. Also does anyone know where you can buy dvd burners for notebooks. I assumed they would be pretty common, but they are not.

Back up, back up, back up.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I swear by Western Digital. Never had one fail on me.

Also, the DVD burner depends on your laptop model. They are not all made the same.

 

[Galactus]

Thanks. I will look for a WD 1TB this week sometime. Until then I guess I will try a Live CD of ubuntu again, if I can get my wireless adapter to work.


I was afraid that was the case with the notebook thing, I guess I will just use it as a big netbook then.

 

[Mr. B]

WD is reasonably well regarded, although I've had a handful fail over the years. Luckily they have a painless return process.

I switched to Samsung drives a couple years ago for their acoustic properties and have been very impressed. I own six of their drives and no trouble yet.

Most manufactures are decent, although the general consensus says avoid Maxtor.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Thanks. I will look for a WD 1TB this week sometime. Until then I guess I will try a Live CD of ubuntu again, if I can get my wireless adapter to work.


I was afraid that was the case with the notebook thing, I guess I will just use it as a big netbook then.

Is it really that difficult to look up your laptop's model number? Produce the model number and I can get you a link to a replacement drive. It's not rocket surgery.

 

[Amaris]

Western Digital, in my experience, is superior to other brands in terms of reliability and durability.

J.

 

[Geckothan]

The only drives I've owned that HAVEN'T failed on me have been Western Digitals. Seagate have been ok in the past, but I've had some bad experiences with them. I've had to RMA 2 7200.10s, and the replacements have failed or have been a bit dodgy. First one came with bad sectors and I couldn't boot off of it after having it for a couple of days. On the other hand, I've got 2 ancient WD Raptors in use every day and they show no signs of failure, though I'm hoping they do fail soon, because I hear WD replace them with VelociRaptors for free, might only be the 150GB ones though.

 

[Marc]

Western Digital, in my experience, is superior to other brands in terms of reliability and durability.

J.

don't think I've ever heard of WD having of the sorts of debarcles that seagate had with the 7200.11s.

I'd recommend staying away from Toshiba hard drives. I had client with them in various Sony Vaios and we had no end of trouble with them including a number of drive failures (a pain when Sony would ship the systems with RAID-0 configuration - lose a drive, lose everything that wasn't backed up).

 

[Galactus]

Thanks. I will look for a WD 1TB this week sometime. Until then I guess I will try a Live CD of ubuntu again, if I can get my wireless adapter to work.


I was afraid that was the case with the notebook thing, I guess I will just use it as a big netbook then.

Is it really that difficult to look up your laptop's model number? Produce the model number and I can get you a link to a replacement drive. It's not rocket surgery.

It is not really worth the trouble and cost I am guessing for the upgrade. We can use it without the burner and I can just by a new notebook.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Thanks. I will look for a WD 1TB this week sometime. Until then I guess I will try a Live CD of ubuntu again, if I can get my wireless adapter to work.


I was afraid that was the case with the notebook thing, I guess I will just use it as a big netbook then.

Is it really that difficult to look up your laptop's model number? Produce the model number and I can get you a link to a replacement drive. It's not rocket surgery.

It is not really worth the trouble and cost I am guessing for the upgrade. We can use it without the burner and I can just by a new notebook.

If you say so, dude.

 

[Amaris]

Western Digital, in my experience, is superior to other brands in terms of reliability and durability.

J.

don't think I've ever heard of WD having of the sorts of debarcles that seagate had with the 7200.11s.

I'd recommend staying away from Toshiba hard drives. I had client with them in various Sony Vaios and we had no end of trouble with them including a number of drive failures (a pain when Sony would ship the systems with RAID-0 configuration - lose a drive, lose everything that wasn't backed up).

Oh man. I can tell you that just from my own experiences working at Dell, that we had more Toshiba drives fail than any other drive. In general, the list of drive replacements went something like this (major manufacturers only):

1. Toshiba
2. Seagate
3. Fujitsu
4. Hitachi
5. Western Digital

There would be a large gap between #3 and #4.

J.

 

[Praxius]

Maxtor's blow..... I have two Westin Digital hard drives right now that I've had for over six years with no problems. The other good thing about WD hard drives, besides being a decent price and good quality, is that they usually have a three year warranty (not including any warranty you might get from the store you buy them in) which means if something screws up, of course you get another one to replace it at no cost.... but in that three years, if nothing happens to the hard drive, chances are nothing will. Most other hard drive companies that I heard of do not offer any decent warranties on their devices.

I'm actually suprised my hard drives lasted this long.

Meanwhile, Maxtor's in my experience are seriously prone to getting bad sectors or all out breaking down and locking up to a point where they're useless and you can no longer get your information off them even if you tried.

 

[superstring01]

I was a big fan of Maxtor until they got bought out by Seagate. Like Mercedes merging with Chrysler. . .

. . . oh. . . that really happened? What a dumb idea.

~String

 

[Iasius]

Western Digital, in my experience, is superior to other brands in terms of reliability and durability.

J.

Out of the seven WD hard drives I've owned over the last eight years, all but one of them have failed. Some failed after a few months, others lasted around three years.

I've been gradually replacing them with Samsung drives (eight of them now). I haven't had any problems with them yet.

Then again, I may just have been unlucky. Also, the case I had a few years ago wasn't ventilated as well.

 

[USS Triumphant]

I worked for a computer repair/retail shop for almost a decade, and with rare exceptions where a particular entire model is just crap (Quantum, for example, made a line of "Bigfoot" hard drives that fell into this category), my experience has been that all of the manufacturers have QA cycles. We would get a shipment or a few shipments of a particular model of (Seagate/Maxtor/WD/Hitachi/etc) and they'd be fine, and then we'd get one where half the drives had problems. Switch to another brand, and repeat. Or, our purchasing agent wouldn't happen to notice the high failure rate before ordering more - and the next batch would frequently be fine again.

Presented with a fairly even choice on price, I'd probably buy Maxtor or WD. But that's because I seemed to perceive slightly fewer bad batches from them, not because we never had any.

Also, you might want to read what reviewers at Amazon, Tiger Direct, and Newegg are saying about that WD 1TB - assuming you are talking about the external units. I know the early models had heat dissipation issues that would kill 'em, but they may have fixed that in the newer units.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Isn't there an urban legend going around that Quantum "Fireball" drives live up to their name?

 

[farmkid]

The only drives I've owned that HAVEN'T failed on me have been Western Digitals. Seagate have been ok in the past, but I've had some bad experiences with them. I've had to RMA 2 7200.10s, and the replacements have failed or have been a bit dodgy. First one came with bad sectors and I couldn't boot off of it after having it for a couple of days. On the other hand, I've got 2 ancient WD Raptors in use every day and they show no signs of failure, though I'm hoping they do fail soon, because I hear WD replace them with VelociRaptors for free, might only be the 150GB ones though.

Interesting. I've had two drives fail on me. One was a Maxtor and the other was a WD. I have a 100% track record with IBM/Hitachi and Seagate.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I've actually experienced very, very few drive failures. I did break the logic board on a WD once, and they wouldn't sell me a replacement board, so I had to buy an identical drive just so I could swap the logic board from it, and get my data off of the drive. Then, swapped it back to the new drive and went about my business.

 

[Marc]

I worked for a computer repair/retail shop for almost a decade, and with rare exceptions where a particular entire model is just crap (Quantum, for example, made a line of "Bigfoot" hard drives that fell into this category), my experience has been that all of the manufacturers have QA cycles. We would get a shipment or a few shipments of a particular model of (Seagate/Maxtor/WD/Hitachi/etc

I'd forgotten the BigFoots - sold a few of them in my time and can't remember if we had any fail I can remember being rather unimpressed by them. Slow as buggery and iirc there built in a 5.25" form factor.

IBM also had a bad run about 10 years go with their Deskstar range earning them the name "Deathstar" it reached the point where IBM had the so many fail they began to look for excuses not to warranty the drive. I heard about one where the plastic surround of the IDE connector had been cracked removing the cable and they used that as excuse not to warranty.

 

[Silanda]

I'd forgotten the BigFoots - sold a few of them in my time and can't remember if we had any fail I can remember being rather unimpressed by them. Slow as buggery and iirc there built in a 5.25" form factor.

I used to have a Bigfoot many moons ago. It is the only drive I've had to date that failed before I junked the machine it was in. Currently I swear by Western Digital.