Who makes the best hard drives?

[Amaris]

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.

You may have had a bad cycle, like what Triumphant was referring in his post. My experience isn't the standard by any means, but after thousands of hard drives making their way through our repair facility every week, and the numbers showing a marked quality difference between WD and everyone else (WD almost always had the lowest number in need of repair), I pretty much swear by them. We also used to get a lot of the first generation SSDs (Solid State Drives) back, but I figured that was because people figured they were indestructible and were rougher on their systems as a result.

J.

 

[Jadzia]

If I remember my hard disks correctly,

My first was Seagate. No problems. Very occasionally failed it's POST and refused to spin up, but a second try was always enough. I liked this disk a lot. The data transfer was always very smooth and steady, unlike like the chaotic bucketing systems that drives use now. But it was less than a CD in capacity.

Second was Maxtor. Trashed my boot partition about once every six months. I was glad to get rid of it. I think it was the write cache that liked to wait too long before writing data, just incase any more came through for that sector. This sometimes overlapped with system shutdown causing said error.

Third was Samsung. Reliable. I had no problems with it, although it was a bit slow for it's size. This one sounded so squeaky new when I got it, sort of a loud springy quality to all of it's noises for the first six months.

Fourth was Hitachi. No problems with it.

Fifth is Seagate. Slower than my Hitachi disk even though it is the same logical size, but no problems with it. Quieter too.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

The brands I have used without significant issues are:

1. Western Digital
2. Seagate
3. Samsung

I believe I had a couple failures with Samsungs. Never a failure with a WD or Seagate, however WD was usually a better cost/performance deal.

While my firsthand experience with Maxtors is limited, I do find it curious that, when I would be called on to fix someone's computer, at least 50% of the bum hard drives I encountered were Maxtors.

 

[Santaman]

Every manufacturer has a bad batch now and then, also some drives with a hiddious reputation sometimes will run for eons..

My experience after the odd 11.000 computers is that Samsung has been very consistent in terms of quality and reliability, they are almost boring in that respect, each generation and each revission of a hard drive type will either be totally the same or a good incremental yet not spectacular improvement over the old one.

Seagate is company that either makes incredible drives or they're rubbish, I own several types of MFM drives by them, one of them being a Seaget ST412 which was originally made for a 1983 IBM XT the drive is rated to operate for about 11.000 hours, its now 27(!!!) years later and it STILL works flawlessly, the old IDE Decathlon drives were excelent and very fast except a certain type, the later Medalist U4 types were meh in terms of reliability and even more meh in terms of performance, the later U8 were better but long term reliability sucked, nowadays its still the same, some are great, others not so.

Western Digital usually makes well build drives, they however do sometimes overtax themselves and try to push for speed and performance a tad to much, old WD's are great, 40 and 80 Megabyte Caviar drives of the old days were more then excelent.

Maxtor was a very up and down company, the early IDE drives were magnificent, later on they nearly went bust and produced shitty harddrives, then Hyundai bought them, quality went up like a rocket and until they merged with Seagate they had generally good drives.

Hitachi is becomming a second Samsung, their drives just work, usually they don't have the big ups and downs like Seagate, I've got a few of their drives some ata and some sata and after 4 years none of them failed.

In the old days you had a lot more companies...

Seagate of course,
Alps Electric, also a big Floppy drive manufacturer.
WD
Maxtor
IBM

Miniscribe, horrible, horrible HORRIBLE, build about the worst drive possible in the MFM era, they went bust HA HA HA serves them right...

NEC, used to make very high quality drives of their own design, later on the build IBM drives under licence and then quit the business.

Microscience
Kyocera
Kalok (argh!)
Rodime

Quantum, and no fireballs do not go down in a ball of fire, I've got two of them, one is used in a Cyrix 200+ machine, the other inside a Celeron 466 they both are fine.

Conner, used to hate them because their jumper settings were impossible to figure out and EVERY drive type had a different scheme, so if you (after a year or so) figured out how the hell you had to jumper a CFS 210 A then you still couldn't make heads or tale out of the ludicrious scheme they used on a CFS 420A *headdesk* they do keep going and going and going..

Fujitsu, used to make nigh indestructible 3.5" desktop drives, they were very reliable but only a fraction faster then a Quantum bigfoot, soooo damn sloooooooow, also very quiet.

Tandon, used to make good MFM drives, they were on the slow side though..

I'm not sure Excelstor still operates, they make Hitachi drives under licence, I had one of them which has worked fine for 4 years, I've replaced it with something bigger, will see if it still works..

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Dude, you have a Cyrix 6x86 in your avatar! I had one of those! I remember the "P" rating they used meant about jack shit, too...

 

[Santaman]

The P rating was very deserved, 6x86's had an integer unit that was blistering fast, double 7 stage pipeline, out of order execution etc etc, it was more then awesome, I have a 6x86MX Pr 200+ and its a lot faster then a Pentium 200, BUT this only goes up for integer instructions, the floating point unit isn't much more then a slightly modified 80486 FPU so anything floating point-ish will be sloooow.

 

[Marc]

Every manufacturer has a bad batch now and then, also some drives with a hiddious reputation sometimes will run for eons..

My experience after the odd 11.000 computers is that Samsung has been very consistent in terms of quality and reliability, they are almost boring in that respect, each generation and each revission of a hard drive type will either be totally the same or a good incremental yet not spectacular improvement over the old one.

Seagate is company that either makes incredible drives or they're rubbish, I own several types of MFM drives by them, one of them being a Seaget ST412 which was originally made for a 1983 IBM XT the drive is rated to operate for about 11.000 hours, its now 27(!!!) years later and it STILL works flawlessly, the old IDE Decathlon drives were excelent and very fast except a certain type, the later Medalist U4 types were meh in terms of reliability and even more meh in terms of performance, the later U8 were better but long term reliability sucked, nowadays its still the same, some are great, others not so.

Western Digital usually makes well build drives, they however do sometimes overtax themselves and try to push for speed and performance a tad to much, old WD's are great, 40 and 80 Megabyte Caviar drives of the old days were more then excelent.

Maxtor was a very up and down company, the early IDE drives were magnificent, later on they nearly went bust and produced shitty harddrives, then Hyundai bought them, quality went up like a rocket and until they merged with Seagate they had generally good drives.

Hitachi is becomming a second Samsung, their drives just work, usually they don't have the big ups and downs like Seagate, I've got a few of their drives some ata and some sata and after 4 years none of them failed.

In the old days you had a lot more companies...

Seagate of course,
Alps Electric, also a big Floppy drive manufacturer.
WD
Maxtor
IBM

Miniscribe, horrible, horrible HORRIBLE, build about the worst drive possible in the MFM era, they went bust HA HA HA serves them right...

NEC, used to make very high quality drives of their own design, later on the build IBM drives under licence and then quit the business.

Microscience
Kyocera
Kalok (argh!)
Rodime

Quantum, and no fireballs do not go down in a ball of fire, I've got two of them, one is used in a Cyrix 200+ machine, the other inside a Celeron 466 they both are fine.

Conner, used to hate them because their jumper settings were impossible to figure out and EVERY drive type had a different scheme, so if you (after a year or so) figured out how the hell you had to jumper a CFS 210 A then you still couldn't make heads or tale out of the ludicrious scheme they used on a CFS 420A *headdesk* they do keep going and going and going..

Fujitsu, used to make nigh indestructible 3.5" desktop drives, they were very reliable but only a fraction faster then a Quantum bigfoot, soooo damn sloooooooow, also very quiet.

Tandon, used to make good MFM drives, they were on the slow side though..

I'm not sure Excelstor still operates, they make Hitachi drives under licence, I had one of them which has worked fine for 4 years, I've replaced it with something bigger, will see if it still works..

Damn this post brought some memories of drives long gone

I started working in IT 2 weeks shy of 20 years ago so have seen many of these drives come and go and a few that I never heard of a drive manufacturers.

It was at the time when the voice coil drives were starting to take over the from the stepper motor units (those no more need to park the drive before you shutdown), and the 3.5" hard disk units were coming into their own.

Yes NEC had some nice drives. I had a Powermate SX that ran a pair of 42Mb drives that were 3.5" where as not much earlier it was a 40Mb 5.25" unit. Then there were the ESDI drives - a 140Mb and 300Mb. Part of my job was setting up computers using those drives - had to use debug command to the controller to initiate a lower level format before you could use them.

SCSI was around at the time but never got to it that much.

There was also RLL but I only ever came across one of those.

First IDE drive I saw in the NEC Powermate 286 (probably the point at which their quality started to drop). The APC IIIs, IVs and Powermate 1s/SX/386 were very solidly built then everything became plastic with my dad giving the PM286 the ironic nickname of "boatanchor".

 

[Amaris]

...[Excellent post that takes a walk down memory lane -J]...

Oh man. I remember Quantum Fireballs. I used to have one in my old Compaq Computer. That particular PC also had a K6-2 350mhz processor, 256 MB RAM and Windows 98SE. I miss that computer. I bought it from a Rent to Own place I had worked for, the Manager was a friend of my dad's so he sold it to me for $50. All I had to replace was the power supply (only cost $12). I wore that computer down and it still ran flawlessly and that drive chugged all the way. Finally, I gave it away to a church and from what I hear they still have it, and didn't replace anything (they added Windows XP though and it still runs great!). I'm sorry, I'm a big fan of the old AMD K6-2 line of processors.

J.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

The P rating was very deserved, 6x86's had an integer unit that was blistering fast, double 7 stage pipeline, out of order execution etc etc, it was more then awesome, I have a 6x86MX Pr 200+ and its a lot faster then a Pentium 200, BUT this only goes up for integer instructions, the floating point unit isn't much more then a slightly modified 80486 FPU so anything floating point-ish will be sloooow.

Ah, the FPU performance. That's what I was thinking of. I remember my PR 200+ was a piece of shit when it came to any kind of 3D gaming, predating the acceptance of 3D-accelerated video cards.

It was pretty decent at most things, but boy did it ever suck at FP operations.

I also remember some games refused to run because the PR 200+ actually ran at 150MHz, and many games were requiring 166MHz+ at that time. While the CPU was, according to Cyrix, theoretically powerful enough, the games would refuse to run if they had mandatory CPU frequency checks in them. And my motherboard's multipliers were fused somehow. No matter how I arranged the jumpers, the FSB wouldn't do anything other than 75MHz, so over- or underclocking were not options. When the Cyrix finally burned out, I replaced it with a Pentium 166MHz chip, which ran at 187MHz due to the jacked-up jumper configuration. The board was supposed to be good enough to handle up to a 233MHz Pentium, but I tried one and it wouldn't work at all, since I couldn't get the FSB down to 66MHz.

Wow, how I miss the '90's.

 

[Santaman]

Damn this post brought some memories of drives long gone

I started working in IT 2 weeks shy of 20 years ago so have seen many of these drives come and go and a few that I never heard of a drive manufacturers.

It was at the time when the voice coil drives were starting to take over the from the stepper motor units (those no more need to park the drive before you shutdown), and the 3.5" hard disk units were coming into their own.

Yes NEC had some nice drives. I had a Powermate SX that ran a pair of 42Mb drives that were 3.5" where as not much earlier it was a 40Mb 5.25" unit. Then there were the ESDI drives - a 140Mb and 300Mb. Part of my job was setting up computers using those drives - had to use debug command to the controller to initiate a lower level format before you could use them.

SCSI was around at the time but never got to it that much.

There was also RLL but I only ever came across one of those.

First IDE drive I saw in the NEC Powermate 286 (probably the point at which their quality started to drop). The APC IIIs, IVs and Powermate 1s/SX/386 were very solidly built then everything became plastic with my dad giving the PM286 the ironic nickname of "boatanchor".

Try hauling a original IBM AT, its back breaking to say the least.

Aaah stepper motors.. love them, they boldly step to where about the right track should be.
Voice coil actuators are a lot more stupid, they have no idea where they are and used to need an extra platter with servo information embedded onto them so it actually could find anything at all.

The first ESDI drive I ever saw is the 21 megabyte drive inside my PS/d Model 30, I have an IBM XT with a Seagate ST11 RLL controller which drives a Seagate ST225 R which is a one platter RLL drive.

Debug command to low level format a MFM drive is:

debug [enter]
G=C800:5 [enter]

My oldest voice coil drive is a Seagate ST4026 its a full hight 5'25" drive with three platters, two for the information and the third platter holds the servo information.

As for SCSI, I have some 100Megabyte WD SCSI drives coming from ancient IBM PS/2 machines and a bunch of Seagate 2.1Gb Barracuda drives which are the loudest drives I know, you can't imagine the high pitched grating drone they make in combination with an ever higher pitched whine, it makes it impossible to stay near a machine with them for longer then 5 minutes, stay longer and you get a nervous breakdown..

J, K6's are great, really, together with the IBM/Cyrix chips and the IDT Centaurs they made sure that Intel had to dish out good chips for lower prices.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

The K6 and K6-2 weren't too bad, as budget CPUs went.

 

[Marc]

As for SCSI, I have some 100Megabyte WD SCSI drives coming from ancient IBM PS/2 machines and a bunch of Seagate 2.1Gb Barracuda drives which are the loudest drives I know, you can't imagine the high pitched grating drone they make in combination with an ever higher pitched whine, it makes it impossible to stay near a machine with them for longer then 5 minutes, stay longer and you get a nervous breakdown..

I've heard the whine from a low capacity Barracuda SCSI - it got complaints from some-one working on the otherside of the office. Was also a bit pissed it was e-bay purchas and turned out to be a half height drive - not low profile so I never ended up using it.

 

[Orac Zen]

The only two drives I've had keel over were both Western Digitals. Yet I have two older WD drives that are still running (almost) perfectly (one has become pretty noisy over the past year or so, so it's been retired). Go figure. I won't be buying another WD HD, anyway.

The main drive in this PC is a Samsung and it's been completely trouble-free. Ditto the Samsung in my main external drive and the four or five Seagate HDs I have either in this machine, the old PC or in external boxes.

Go with whatever Santaman recommends, though. He knows what he's talking about.

 

[Santaman]

Harddrives are elecromechanical devices that are just waiting to go wrong, they work on such small tolerances that its a mircacle that they work as reliable as they do.
If a harddrive hasn't failed after the first year or so then there's a pretty good chance that it will run reliably for about 4 years more and probably will even see 8 to 10 years of service but I do advice to replace a drive when its about 5-6 years old because of wear and tear, bearings will be out of tolerance by then and the actuator mechanism that moves the read/write heads will be pretty worn then as well.

 

[Marc]

Harddrives are elecromechanical devices that are just waiting to go wrong, they work on such small tolerances that its a mircacle that they work as reliable as they do.
If a harddrive hasn't failed after the first year or so then there's a pretty good chance that it will run reliably for about 4 years more and probably will even see 8 to 10 years of service but I do advice to replace a drive when its about 5-6 years old because of wear and tear, bearings will be out of tolerance by then and the actuator mechanism that moves the read/write heads will be pretty worn then as well.

I once had a client get shitty because their seagate hard disk failed out of warranty (back when it was a one year). The problem was hardly ever turned on. Had they run the computer more often the drive would probably of failed much quicker and they would of been under warranty.

 

[Brolan]

I really like WD. I have two WD 80 GB hard drives that I installed in my Tivo back in 2002. They have been running 24/7 ever since.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Harddrives are elecromechanical devices that are just waiting to go wrong, they work on such small tolerances that its a mircacle that they work as reliable as they do.
If a harddrive hasn't failed after the first year or so then there's a pretty good chance that it will run reliably for about 4 years more and probably will even see 8 to 10 years of service but I do advice to replace a drive when its about 5-6 years old because of wear and tear, bearings will be out of tolerance by then and the actuator mechanism that moves the read/write heads will be pretty worn then as well.

Someone once made an analogy that the mechanism of a hard drive is akin to a supersonic jet flying 2 inches off the ground over a mountain range, and that we should be glad they work at all considering the stresses and delicate parts involved.

 

[Jadzia]

Someone once made an analogy that the mechanism of a hard drive is akin to a supersonic jet flying 2 inches off the ground over a mountain range, and that we should be glad they work at all considering the stresses and delicate parts involved.

Or if the disc was the size of a city, then writing one bit of data is like targetting a square millimetre of ground. That's as small as a grain of sand... in a city... then consider that lot spinning at 7200rpm.

Things look silly when we try and scale them up.

Remember that weight and volume and surface area, don't scale up at the same rate as length does, so these aren't true analogies.

 

[Santaman]

Its not an entirely truthfull analogy but you do have read/write heads moving at incredible speeds at mind boggeling small distances from the platters, they're carried by a layer of air that moves at about platter speed, so for SCSI/SAS drives 15.000 RPM and they effortlessly write data by changing the properties of a magnetic domain which is around 10 nanometer in diameter.

 

[Galactus]

Well I purchased the hard drive and have it up and running. I thought for a second that my kid fried the motherboard too. Didn't really feel like upgrading that too. I never was able to get Ubuntu Live CD to work with my wireless adapter. Guess I will try it will the latest version.

Now I have to decide if I want to add another internal drive or an external one for back up?

Oh I want my 60GB back from this 1TB drive.

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.

Ok so you are saying that it would be cheaper and easier to install a dvd burner into my notebook, than it would be to just purchase an external usb one for the rare occasion I need to burn a DVD and also will be able to use on a netbook when I get around to purchasing one?