Hard Drive Manufacturers: The Definitive Thread

[jcarle]

Let's make this the definitive thread on hard drives. Let's debate, argue and exchange all our personal experiences, thoughts and opinions regarding current manufacturers of hard drives.

I kept the poll down to the top 3 hard drive manufacturers because those are the ones that are the most significant in the current market.

[Slimy]

It's not that I trust WD the least, I just don't see the point of dishing out the extra cash

[sylvianorth]

Had 2 Maxtors, both made horrid noises, one broke causing me to lose tons of data.

Only had seagate since, no problems at all.

[tain]

I never met a Maxtor that I liked. Had lots of good luck with WD; Seagate to a lesser extent.

[jcarle]

I got scared off of Seagate when I had to RMA a batch of about 30 different 40GB and 60GB hard drives... mind you, that was out of a lot of several hundred, but still... Western Digital is the only company I've never sent an RMA to. I'm perplexed on how people have come to distrust a company I trust so much, or the inverse, how people can trust so much a company I distrust so much. I guess it's like all things in life, personal experiences make it hard to change your mind.

[CoffeeFiend]

I got scared off of Seagate when I had to RMA a batch of about 30 different 40GB and 60GB hard drives... mind you, that was out of a lot of several hundred, but still... Western Digital is the only company I've never sent an RMA to. I'm perplexed on how people have come to distrust a company I trust so much, or the inverse, how people can trust so much a company I distrust so much. I guess it's like all things in life, personal experiences make it hard to change your mind.

I guess it comes from mixed experiences. I've never had to RMA a single seagate drive EVER. And very few from maxtor/samsung/thosiba/hitachi/etc. Then there's the obvious ones I've seen LOTS of - not really the more known bad series like 5 platter "deathstars" - but things like the notoriously bad batches of fujitsus that resulted in a class action lawsuit (we're measuring by the full triwall of bad HDs here). And besides those bad batches, the only brand we've had significant problems with is WD. Be it by total # of bad drives or percentage (bad/total) or anything, they lose on all metrics. It's bad enough that we ensure that the new PCs we buy don't have WD drives in 'em (and we buy them by the pallet). So yeah, I don't trust my data to any WD drive, and will take ANYTHING over it. After seeing so many bad WDs, there's no way I could possibly trust them (it's not just one or two bad series like the fujitsu or "deathstars"). It's certainly not a few ppl on an forum that have seen 2 bad maxtors in a lifetime (hence they must suck!) or such that will make me change my mind. From anecdotal evidence, extremely low sample sizes making these statistically meaningless, when it's not actually the user's fault the drive died (cooling problem or such), and plain luck/bad luck (on a low scale), it's hard to attach much relevance to these.

As for the best/most trusted brand, I picked seagate for lack of more comprehensive options ("almost anything"), but it's a good drive, good value, good performance and all.

As for the totally untrusted one, I guess everybody can tell...

[jcarle]

@crahak:

You don't happen to remember which drives you had problems with? 120GB? 2MB cache? I do remember there being issues with the 120GB and unrelatedly that 2MB drives were rebranded maxtors...

[CoffeeFiend]

Like I said, it's not any single batch/size. From pretty old stuff (as far as corporate PCs go) to the new-ish. Just not the very latest, as we're stopped buying that particular brand a little while ago.

[LLXX]

@crahak:

You don't happen to remember which drives you had problems with? 120GB? 2MB cache? I do remember there being issues with the 120GB and unrelatedly that 2MB drives were rebranded maxtors...

I think those were the BBs.

I have a pair of WD1200JB and they've been fine for 2 years of continuous operation.

[jcarle]

@crahak:

You don't happen to remember which drives you had problems with? 120GB? 2MB cache? I do remember there being issues with the 120GB and unrelatedly that 2MB drives were rebranded maxtors...

I think those were the BBs.

I have a pair of WD1200JB and they've been fine for 2 years of continuous operation.

Yea, BB would be a 2MB cache drive. Unfortunately, it seems that the 2MB drives were not really up to be the most reliable drives. Personally, I've only ever bought 8MB drives for that reason.

[Lost Soul]

I never met a Maxtor that I liked. Had lots of good luck with WD; Seagate to a lesser extent.

ive had good luck for years with wd also

[mad_dog369]

Some time in 2004 I got my hands on a office pc specs were, 128 ram, 1.2 GHz Intel, 20gig hdd, don’t remember the mother bored( the mother board had died)

the Hdd had no branding on it and the serial code is just zero's and it's really heavy and feels solid, no hdd programmes can get a clear name from the hdd and it has never had data corruption nor loss and has never crashed oh yeah did I mention it is pretty dam quiet even when scanning with an a.v, it sits in my old pc in my room that I use every now and then.

P.s had bad luck with WD and only ever owned 1 Maxtor that also died within the first month owning it.

Edited December 21, 2006 by mad_dog369

[ripken204]

i equally trust WD and Seagate, i hate maxtor.

[Maleko]

Well, i trust both Seagate and WD as much, but use Western Digital atm, so voted WD as my trusted, Maxtor- least...

had most problems with maxtors, the onyl ones ive had to have replaced.

[Tarun]

I've had several WD's just die on me or have bad sectors out of the box. Never had a single issue with any Seagate HDD's ever.