All hard drives suck!

[jkersenbr]

Hard drive blew up in my main rig... 80GB Maxtor SATA. It was about 6 months old. System was running fine before breakfast and after breakfast I walked past the office door and noticed it sitting on a BSOD (XP). Did a power cycle and the drive came up clicking. Nice.

Anyway, Maxtor was the last company I have not personally witnessed a drive failure in warranty from.

So, recommend me a drive.

My system is always on and I need SATA. And I want one that will at least make it to the end of warranty before mutilating my data.

Is the extra cost of a WD Raptor worth it?

 

[Imyourzero]

Originally posted by: jkersenbr
Hard drive blew up in my main rig... 80GB Maxtor SATA. It was about 6 months old. System was running fine before breakfast and after breakfast I walked past the office door and noticed it sitting on a BSOD (XP). Did a power cycle and the drive came up clicking. Nice.

Anyway, Maxtor was the last company I have not personally witnessed a drive failure in warranty from.

So, recommend me a drive.

My system is always on and I need SATA. And I want one that will at least make it to the end of warranty before mutilating my data.

Is the extra cost of a WD Raptor worth it?

I have also had good luck with Maxtor but I see a LOT of people on the forums dissing Maxtor...and I don't like how they changed their warranty from 3 years to 1 year.

I've also had good luck with WD drives. I had terrible luck with IBM (fast, but I had 2-3 Deskstar drives die on me), although I hear the issues have been fixed and Hitachi drives are supposed to be fast and more reliable than their IBM predecessors.

I see Seagate recommended often, which is funny because years ago I was told to stay far far away from them by someone who ran a PC repair business. I recently bought a Seagate 200GB drive so we'll see how it fares in the long term. Also, all the XBOX consoles I've seen use Seagate drives and I don't think Microsoft would choose them if they had an abnormally high failure rate, even if they were cheaper...so maybe they've improved in recent years.

As far as the Raptor, some people will tell you yes and some will tell you no. I've read plenty of user reviews and while the drive consistently gets good reviews and is undoubtedly fast, some people just don't seem to benefit much from the additional speed. You'll have one user post and say "OMG OMG this Raptor OWNZ JOO it is so fast and Doom 3 levels take 3 seconds to load instead of 3 minutes!!!!11" and then you'll see another post that says "Yes, the Raptor is fast, but it's not THAT much faster than my old 7200 RPM drive. Windows loads faster and shuts down faster, games load faster, and that's it. It's not worth the money for the relatively small amount of storage you get; your money would be better spent on a high-capacity 7200 RPM drive."

My point is that whether the Raptor is worth the additional cost is simply a matter of opinion. If you want faster loading times than your current 7200 RPM drive(s) and don't mind the relatively low storage capacity of the Raptors (in comparision to the more common 120/160/200/250 GB drives) then it's probably a worthwhile choice.

 

[MustISO]

I've never lost a drive at home (knock on wood). I have every brand except for HItachi at home. At work we've lost all different brands.

BTW, Maxtor changed their 1 year back to 3. Not sure which drives it affects.

 

[shortylickens]

Dont really feel like voting, but I'll tell you a story that happened just last night.

Have had a SATA Western Digital (250GB) for about one week. Was just enough time to move all my misc files over. Music, movies and lots of game mods.

Only one week went by and the thing crapped out on me. Nasty little grinding noise every time I accessed it. At first I was able to copy a few small files at a time, then it would freeze. Every time I ran Norton or chkdsk my system would freeze when it was 26% complete.
Eventually the thing died completely. Was very angry for several hours.
Am not concerned about the warrenty or return policy right now. The data I had was much more valuable than the drive itself.
Strange that I have another of the exact same drive working for several months now with absolutely no problems. I use it only for game installations.

Before anyone gives me the Oh-so-useful advice of "ALWAYS BACK UP", first tell me of an optical drive that burns 160GB media.

The hard disk drive is an efficient, simple, usually reliable means of bulk storage. Thats why we still have them. The rack-mount server storage solutions are pretty darn reliable, but too expensive and complicated for most folks.
All my truley essential files were backed up to a regular DVD-RW.

You didnt post it so I assume you dont like them but:
The IBM deskstar is the ONLY HD I've ever had that never died on me. Have already heard other peoples issues with them.
I think Hitachi now makes drives for IBM so you may want to look into them.
Eventually (when I feel like having another bulk storage drive for misc stuff) I may get a Hitachi SATA 400GB.
At some point in my life I've had at least 2 WD, Maxtors, Seagates die on me. But I keep using them because they are considered the best and I'm scared of the No-Name brands. Hard storage is one of the things few people will experiment with. The risk is just too great. Even with all the tape and optical storage available to do backups.

 

[Fern]

These days, I just look for one with at least a 3 yr warranty (I keep backups).

I've had good luck with Maxtor, Seagate, & WD. Bad luck with IBM's. Many peeps now seem to like Seagate, apparantly there are quiet.

Looks like your Maxtor would still be under warranty, so you can RMA for a new one.

Sorry, haven't had Raptor, so I can't say.

 

[Zepper]

I would look at either Seagate (just went to 5 yr warranty on all drives) or Samsung (3 yr warr) which are among the quietest out there. But I have nothing against the new series of Hitachis as yet and they have 3yr warranties too.
.bh.

 

[Anonemous]

they are all good, I've heard the hitachi's are the fastest (non-raptor) drives but have the meowing sound which they fixed in a firmware...
Seagates, Maxtors, WD's are all good

Get whichever one is the cheapest or in the hot deal. Right now the Seagate, is at the top of my list with its 5 year warranty and low prices which can't be beat. (200 gig for 60$ 2 weeks ago).

 

[Mik3y]

i cant call western digital good, because their reliability went down when they lost a lot of money (i guess because of stock). i think WD has great price for performance though and i do admire the raptors. as for my favorite, it has to be seagate for their speed, reliability, and quietness.

 

[Steve]

Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi, Excelstor.

 

[Imyourzero]

Originally posted by: Anonemous
they are all good, I've heard the hitachi's are the fastest (non-raptor) drives but have the meowing sound which they fixed in a firmware...

LOL! Hitachi's suffered from a meowing sound? I didn't hear about that. Did it affect all drives or just certain models?

Here, kitty kitty...

 

[MDE]

Originally posted by: Imyourzero

Originally posted by: Anonemous
they are all good, I've heard the hitachi's are the fastest (non-raptor) drives but have the meowing sound which they fixed in a firmware...

LOL! Hitachi's suffered from a meowing sound? I didn't hear about that. Did it affect all drives or just certain models?

Here, kitty kitty...

That was their fix for the "Deathstar" syndrome.

 

[imported_NoGodForMe]

Go with Seagate SCSI. Specifically, Cheetah.
Many will say it's not needed, but trust me, it's worth it.
The drives don't fail.
http://www.newegg.com/app/View...=16-103-159&depa=0
http://www.newegg.com/app/View...=22-111-138&depa=0
5 year warranty. Diagnostics are on the Adaptec card along with the low level formatter. Boot up, press Ctrl-A, and you can scan the disk for errors and fix any bad sectors. But that doesn't happen. Yes, you're paying 3x, but you get what you pay for, and in this case, it's good.

Oh, and if you wanted to save some money, but still stay with SCSI, you would go with this.
http://www.newegg.com/app/View...=22-111-140&depa=0

Drive is slightly slower, but will be rock solid.

 

[Steve]

I'd recommend this card.

 

[Delorian]

SCSI is just way too expensive if you ask me. I do like WD though, I've had 3-4 of them so far and not one has failed and only one had a few bad blocks on it, but was obsolete and still working at the time I stopped using it. Plus WD offers 1-3 yr warranty on most all of their drives and their RMA program was easy to deal with (bought a refurbed that was DOA).

 

[Bateluer]

My 250GB external Maxtor started having problems recently.

Gonna stick with WD in the foreseeable future.

 

[batmanuel]

I've had good luck with the 8GB, 30GB, 80GB and 120GB Western Digital drives I've owned/installed in family member's machines. Never had a one go bad yet. My mom and dad's computer had a Maxtor that started getting corrupted after about 6 months though, but the replacement drive worked fine ever since.

I really don't think SCSI is worth the cost unless you are running a serious video editing workstation or a server. If you're concerned about your data, there's always RAID-1 to save your butt if a cheap, high capacity SATA drive goes bad - no need to invest in a million-hour MTBF drive.

 

[Texun]

Remember that it's hard to say which brand sucks more than another when the market shares aren't known. Maxtor and WD have been saturating the market for a while, so there is no doubt that you will hear of more people reporting problems with them. There is of course the "Rule of Thumb" method that you can use by reading about other user's experience with various drives. It's not scientific but the info can be useful if you take it with a grain of salt.

I like Maxtor, and after years of buying nothing by Max drives I finally found one that went dead in less than a year. Does that mean that Maxtor sucks? Maybe, and maybe not. Still, most people will shy away from a certain drive after getting hosed by a hard crash.

Seagates are among the highest rated drives, but my experience with them has been miserable. Three out of five were either DOA or died within a year. Still, Seagate is a well regarded drive manufacture and their customer service is excellent.

Along with a ton of Maxtors and 5 Seagates, I have used WDs and have now moved over to Samsung... and I like 'em! Very quiet and they have a decent 3 year warranty. They may not be the fastest but I can't feel the difference.

 

[JBT]

Id go Seagate. 5 years warrenty is great.

 

[eldorado99]

I don't know, I have personally never had a Maxtor or Western Digital Drive fail on me, I have had one Seagate fail on me, but it was very.... very... very old, so I don't count it as a mark against their name in my own opinion of them.

 

[mechBgon]

I'm waiting for Cheetah 15k.4 myself The trouble is that my SCSI drives don't wear out. How am I gonna justify this purchase?! *sigh*

My little sister does have the 120GB Hitachi 8MB cache model, and it does meow every so often. Feels sluggish in use, compared to a Cheetah 15k.3 or even an old X15-36LP, but that's the tradeoff for having about 8x more capacity, I guess. I know she'd prefer the capacity, so that's what I got her.

 

[thelordemperor]

Know what all IDE drives suck pretty much equally and die often ('cept IBM Deathstars lol)

However Seagate will replace it for five years, vs the other companies three or even one, thus they get my reccomendation for now.

If you want personal stats... I have lost:

2 out of 12 Western Digital Purchased
2 out of 4 Maxtor purchased
0 out of 0 Seagate purchased
0 out of 0 Samsung purchased
1 out of 1 IBM purchased

All were under warranty so nothing lost but time (I backup heh woot).

 

[iwantanewcomputer]

how much does leaving it running 24/7 compare to turning it on once a day and leaving it on for like 12 hours in terms of lifetime.

it makes sense to turn the puter off while not using, but i've heard that starting up hds often is bad for them too

 

[Imyourzero]

Originally posted by: thelordemperor
Know what all IDE drives suck pretty much equally and die often

Why do you say that? That is a bold and (IMO) stupid statement. I'm not going to argue that IDE is more reliable than SCSI by any means, but all IDE drives don't suck and they all most certainly don't die often. In the grand scheme of things, then yes...IDE drives have a higher failure rate than SCSI drives. I suppose in those terms, IDE drives do die often (you can read about several IDE failures a week here with virtually no SCSI failures...then again the % of people that run SCSI is a wee minority). But a newbie could come to this site looking to upgrade their hard drive, see your statement, and think that if he/she purchases an IDE drive that it won't last a long time and that's not necessarily true. I can think of two hard drives that I purchased LONG ago (a 5 GB WD Caviar and a 13.6 GB Maxtor) that are both still running fine to this day.

SCSI is superior but it's not for everyone. The cost is prohibitive and the main draw of IDE is that you can get so much more storage for much less money than a SCSI drive (not to mention not having to worry about extra controller cards and additional drivers).

 

[Arcanedeath]

For reliability I'd say Samsung is the best nowadays w/ Seagate 2nd but seagate has 5 year warrenties on all their drives so I'd prolly give them the nod at this point. Check out Storagereview.com for more info

 

[cirthix]

about a year ago, i was working it the comp lab at my high school, we had 2 imacs with burnt chips on the pcb of maxtor hard drives. same chip. i kept the image in my mind for future refrence. fast forward a while. i had a maxor drive, my sister in law had a maxtor drive, same chip in same location fried in a puff of smoke on her drive. luckily, we could temprrarily use my controller board on her drive to save her data, and then return mine to its working state. interestingly enough, the pcb was easily removable as it seems maxtor has these die quickly, and then needs to have them refurbished in the shortest amount of time.
CROSS OUT MAXTOR FROM THE LIST
Fast forward again, when i bought a 160gb wd special edition drive from newegg. 2 weeks later, i had problems with bad contacts and warping of the pcb, even when i had it in normal use, no tossing around or overheating (i have a fan aimed at it). the replacement is kinda flaky. my brother has a seagate, and let me borrow it, it never gave me any problems, not a bad contact, not a bad read or bad write. it consistently stayed cooler than the wd drive, even though they were the same rpm and the wd had a fan on it!!! did i mention that the seagate was quieter?
CROSS OUT WESTERN DIGITAL FROM THE LIST

do yourself a favor and get a SEAGATE!!! best drives out there, they run coool, are just as fast as any other, are reliable and quet, now with 5 year warranties. what else do you want?