Which hard drive brand do you trust?

[kleinkinstein]

Good price, great drive. If it does drop on BF, you're only talking maybe $5. WD has no reason to drop the price of their stalwart drive any less than $80. Buy two!

But just know that you're paying twice the price of a Barracuda. Where the 1.5T = $0.043/G, 2T = $0.045/G, and the 3T = $0.040/G. I've owned maybe 6 over ten years without a hiccup, all in and out of Raid.

Now if you're simply looking for the lowest out of pocket cost 1T drive, well then this Hitachi Deskstar is it at $60 with promo code EMCJJNA47

[Puffnstuff]

Originally Posted by Shephard

do you backup to DVDs?

I have in the past but have migrated to bd along with an external drive.

[Charlie98]

I was afraid of the Seagate drives based on reviews and them dropping their warranty, but I have a 3-year old Seagate GoFlex portable USB drive (in fact, I have another on the way... redundant backups are your friend) that has not given me one problem, ever... even given it's really poor NE feedback. I also bought a slightly used 1TB Seagate .12 and it has been fantastic the past 6 months or so I have had it in.

I find that large drives are ALL somewhat flaky once you exceed 1 TB. But, I don't condemn them. I never buy drives greater than 500GB, and never slower than 7200 RPM.

When I built my current build last year, I was coming off a 80GB HDD in my old Dell, I thought 500GB was an awesome amount of space... but now I'm building an HTPC and need more space (based on HDD space limits,) hence the Seagate 1TB drive, and one in the future... probably the Hitachi .D single-disk 1TB, although I'm open to a WD.

My current desktop has 3 500GB Hitachis... 1 pre-flood, 2 post-flood, and they have been great.

I recently bought a video security system that has a single 500GB WD green (AUDX) and I'm a little apprehensive about having all my security data on that disk... I still don't trust the green drives.

[Gigantopithecus]

All of them, or rather, none of them. If your data aren't backed up, they must not be that important. I typically buy whatever's the best compromise of price and warranty.

[Ayah]

Trust? No company.
Prefer? Was Seagates before they killed their 5-year warranties. Then it became Hitachi (5/7)K**** , Samsung F4s and WD Blacks.

Right now, I've recently purchased some WD Greens and Reds for testing.

[Shephard]

Originally Posted by kleinkinstein

Good price, great drive. If it does drop on BF, you're only talking maybe $5. WD has no reason to drop the price of their stalwart drive any less than $80. Buy two!

But just know that you're paying twice the price of a Barracuda. Where the 1.5T = $0.043/G, 2T = $0.045/G, and the 3T = $0.040/G. I've owned maybe 6 over ten years without a hiccup, all in and out of Raid.

Now if you're simply looking for the lowest out of pocket cost 1T drive, well then this Hitachi Deskstar is it at $60 with promo code EMCJJNA47

ok thanks. I can price match the Black to $74 so I will do that.

I will let you guys know how it works. Hopefully it is not dead when it comes.

Any tests I can do it on to see if it's ok? If there are no clicks or bad sounds thats a good thing I know.

[Kippa]

I personally trust WD, never had a problem with WD drives. That is more personal preference, not sure who is the best though.

[ronbo613]

A few years ago, I had all Seagate hard drives, save for one WD Black. I started having trouble with more recent Seagate drives, so I switched over to WD Blacks and RE4. I needed higher capacity so I got three Samsung 2TB HD204UI drives. Never had a single issue with the WD hard drives or the Samsungs. Now that Samsung is Seagate, I no longer trust them. I like WD Blacks and RE drives, but I don't trust their "Green" series. Never tried Toshiba, but I think I have a Hitachi drive in one of my laptops, no problems.
I reckon you have to go with the flow here. Comments have been made here about hard drive "batches"; I believe that's mostly the answer to hard drive quality questions. Unless you are totally insane, you should have important data backed up on multiple drives, but then you need more hard drives.
Today, if I wanted a 1TB 7200rpm drive, I would go with a WD Black or RE, maybe give Toshiba a try. A 2-3TB storage drive or NAS drive, I'm leaning towards WD Red even though they don't have much of a track record. I think the pick of relatively inexpensive, reliable 2TB+ drives is pretty slim.
All my computers have SSD boot drives.

[bruceb]

I also agree, WD makes the most reliable hard drives. That is all I use in my computers and for my external 1TB drive.

[jae]

I'm anticipating rebuilding my server, and looking at reviews are terrifying. Quality control is terrible these days. Even though Ill be using RAID1+0, it still a bit worrisome.

[blastingcap]

Originally Posted by jae

I'm anticipating rebuilding my server, and looking at reviews are terrifying. Quality control is terrible these days. Even though Ill be using RAID1+0, it still a bit worrisome.

Even industry professionals say the same: HDD reliability is worse today than in the past. I concur based on my own experiences. RAID 1 will help a bit but consider using ZFS or btrfs.

[OmegaSupreme]

Only drive failure I've ever had was with a maxtor drive. No issues with the Seagates, WD 's (8 drives) or with any of my Samsung spinpoint F3's (5 drives ).

[sandorski]

Originally Posted by jae

I'm anticipating rebuilding my server, and looking at reviews are terrifying. Quality control is terrible these days. Even though Ill be using RAID1+0, it still a bit worrisome.

You might want to check out the WD Red(IIRC) HDs. They are specifically made for Server/RAID use. They are not the fastest, but are designed with better Error correction schemes along with some other improvements not available in run of the mill Consumer HDs.

[mikeymikec]

I haven't seen higher failure rates of Seagate drives recently, I would say I've bought about 100 in the last 9-10 years. Of those, about 5 were returned under warranty, and maybe a couple of others failed. Of course, I can't keep track of all the drives I've bought because they belong to customers.

I used to say "avoid Western Digital", but in recent years I haven't seen anywhere near as many fail as I used to say more than 5 years ago. Since Seagate slashed their warranties, I've been going with WD. Of about 20 drives, 1 has been RMA'd within a year (a Caviar Black).

I don't trust Seagate slashing their warranties down to the legal minimum. I would prefer to get reliability over cutting-edge performance, but I didn't ever regard Seagate to represent cutting-edge performance IIRC. I don't often buy very high capacity drives either (rarely over a terabyte, usually 500GB or less).

I'm not sure I trust either Seagate or WD particularly, as they both have warranty policies of the replacement drive only having something like a 6-month warranty, which I find a bit wrong if I've bought a 5-year warranty drive which fails in under a year. They should at least have to honour the original warranty span from the date of the original drive's purchase, IMO.

[taltamir]

Originally Posted by blastingcap

Short answer:

Avoid Seagate. WD and Toshiba are the other options in this not-very-competitive market. If I had to buy based on brand alone, I'd go with Toshiba--they can't possibly be any worse than Seagate, and might even be better than WD.

Long answer:

There have been two big studies of consumer HDDs used in data centers (Google and CMU) and neither one would name names. However, Backblaze did name names in a blog post and they said they had good experiences (and no failures yet) of Hitach 5k3000 HDDs whereas Seagate and WD--even WD RE HDDs--would fail or drop in and out of arrays more often.

Unfortunately Hitachi doesn't make HDDs anymore; they sold their HDD stuff to WD, except 3.5" production (due to anti-trust regulation), which they sold to Hitachi.

Since Samsung sold out to Seagate, there are only three major consumer 3.5" HDD makers now: WD, Seagate, and Toshiba.

Toshiba may or may not dilute the quality of product from Hitachi's standards--it's too early to really know. In any case their consumer 3.5" HDDs appear to have 2-3 year warranties. If Backblaze was onto something, and Toshiba keeps quality at Hitachi levels or better, I would say Toshiba is the brand to get, but without more information it's hard to say for sure.

Seagate by dropping its warranties to 1 year on most consumer internal HDDs is probably signalling something, because presumably if they had more confidence that their warranty liability wouldn't seriously increase by going from 1 year to 2 years, they'd have at least a 2 year warranty. Seagate's handling of problems like the infamous 7200.11 series also speaks volumes as to how they value (or don't value) customers.

WD has also dropped warranty durations for most HDDs, to 2 years, rather than 1 year. Some of the upper level ones like Red/Black/VelociRaptor/RE HDDs get 3 or more years. I suspect WD's HDDs aren't much more reliable than Seagates, but the extra warranty is valuable. I've personally had HDD failures from Seagate, Samsung, and WD all get repaired under warranty, saving me hundreds of dollars, and until recently I didn't even have that many HDDs!

Overwell very well put.
One little addendum. Every manufacturer had a "bad product line" at some point or another. That is, they made a bad design decision that made a certain model be very prone to failures until it was obsoleted.
And on the more specific, individual models have had firmware bugs.

So if you have the time to, research individual models rather then the company. The reason being is that there isn't a single HDD company that owned up when it had such an issue. None of them has intel's integrity and brand name. Where Intel would recall a defective product, every single HDD maker just lets customers deal with it.