I need to buy two 1 TB hard drives. I'm replacing some Seagate drives that I was refunded for.

Does anyone have any advice on the best quality, most reliable brand and model of drive they would recommend?

So far I was considering the Wesetrn Digital Caviar Black 1TB.

Thanks for any feedback.

Hitachi makes reliable drives, not the fastest but hard to kill... I believe that Google servers also use them by default.

I haven't used Hitachi, but I tend to try to use WD RE3 drives, even in non-RAID configurations. Except if these 2 drives are already in an array, you don't want to mix brands.

My customers have bought a few of Western Digital 1.0TB Green last month. And i haven't heard any complaints for them yet. My two 500GB WDs also works smoothly until now, i bought them about 1 year ago.

My customers have bought a few of Western Digital 1.0TB Green last month. And i haven't heard any complaints for them yet.

The WD green series spin at 5400 RPM though. They're not horribly slow, but they're not exactly the fastest drives around either. They're a good choice if low power (when idle) and quietness are the main factors (performance not so important).

Either ways, none of my 1TB drives failed yet.

My customers have bought a few of Western Digital 1.0TB Green last month. And i haven't heard any complaints for them yet. My two 500GB WDs also works smoothly until now, i bought them about 1 year ago.

I got two of these 1TB drives last week for my home media server - only actively using one at the moment. No complaints so far, but be aware that these new drives have a sector size of 4096 bytes instead of the 512-byte standard that legacy drives use. In other words, these drives will work fine out-of-the-box in newer operating systems (e.g., Windows 7, Mac OS X, most modern Linux flavours, etc.), but you will have to put a jumper on pins 7 and 8 of the drive OR run the WD Align utility from Western Digital if you want to use them properly in legacy operating systems (e.g., Windows XP). I ran the software as I didn't have any jumpers lying around and haven't run into any issues.

Whew, but thanks anyway for the warning.

I've got a Samsung SpinPoint F3 in my main rig and it's great, one of the fastest 1TB drives too thanks to the use of 500GB platters. But you can't go wrong with a Western Digital either and the blacks are speedy and reliable AFAIK. If it is just for mass storage then the WD green drives are perfect. They are very quiet and use low amounts of power like CoffeeFiend said. Good for storage/backup but for OS/apps get a standard 7200RPM drive.

After going through the whole mess with my Seagate 7200.11 drives, I want to get the most reliable drives I can.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the WD Enterpise line of drives such as the WD RE4?

They are about twice the cost of the consumer drives such as the Caviar Green and Black drives.

After going through the whole mess with my Seagate 7200.11 drives, I want to get the most reliable drives I can.

Now, don't start to kick me, but the new 7200.11 drives come out well... But I can feel with you, Seagate just wanted to ignore the users and that ain't right. I buy my drives from a local wholesale that gives me the 3 year warranty, Also I run RAID 1 for my backup.

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Edited April 26, 201016 yr by e-berlin

Does anyone have any thoughts on the WD Enterpise line of drives such as the WD RE4?

They are about twice the cost of the consumer drives such as the Caviar Green and Black drives.

I think these drives are identical to the Caviar Black drives, except for the fact that they are "RAID-enabled," meaning you can use them in any type of RAID. The regular Caviar Blacks, from what I've heard, are missing some kind of error-checking nonsense on them that prevent them from being used in RAIDs, though I may be wrong.