Anything wrong with this drive?

[SSP]

I'm thinking of buying a WD hard drive from a local store. Just wanted to know if there are known problems with these drives before I buy it.

It says the drive is a "WESTERN DIGITAL 40GB EIDE (7200RPM)". I checked with WD's site and it has a (the Caviar drive) seek time of 8.9ms, which is not bad at all. I'll probably be using it as my main drive. Is this hard drive reliable enough to be used as a main drive? Any known problems? I get 1 year warranty on it.

Thanks in advance.

 

[vi edit]

I don't know if WD has improved any, but they have one of the highest RMA rates in the industry. Their old caviar line of HD(this was 2-3 years ago) were the biggest pieces of crap I've ever seen in my life. I have never, EVER seen such a high rate of failure in a hard drive product line.

Needless to say, I personally would be very hesitant to purchase ANY WD drive with only a 1 year warranty.

 

[Hossenfeffer]

I have never, EVER seen such a high rate of failure in a hard drive product line.

Even worse than IBM?

Myself, I've never had trouble with WD drives, though I've only had 15-20 of 'em

 

[vi edit]

Like I said, this was 2-3 years ago. I worked at a John Deere factory as a help desk tech. We had about 800 gateway computers all with WD hard drives in them. I swear RMA'ing a WD caviar drive was a daily occurance.

My personal experience with WD hard drives has been no better as well.

 

[Pepsi90919]

i remember WD's website support board in december of 1997, it was nuts. personally, i was helping the poor guy who had to make his rounds on the message board to calm down people.

then my own WD drive died. i then took on the role of the angry consumer.

 

[SSP]

Could those gateway systems have the lower end 5400RPM drives insted? I dunno.. but still, thats not something I wanted to hear. Anyone know if these newer drives are good or not?

 

[PC166]

harddrive like cars, that are made in USA sucks because they just aren't very long lasting. if made in japan, korea or singapore then it is much better, quieter, faster and lighter too lol. I personally do not like WD, Seagate, Maxtor, or IBM as these have the highest failure rate while fujitsu and samsung seem to be of more reliable drive with more advanced mechanism that are intelligently design to last longer and they operate cooler too.

 

[Soybomb]

Originally posted by: SSP
Could those gateway systems have the lower end 5400RPM drives insted? I dunno.. but still, thats not something I wanted to hear. Anyone know if these newer drives are good or not?

If vi's talking about the same time I'm thinking of (pretty sure he is...) then there really weren't 7200 rpm ide drives readily available (if at all....dates are fuzzy ) I had a very similar massively negative experience with like 800meg-3 gig wd caviars dying like crazy. I haven't used them much since, although I do thinkt he quality has improved alot since then. Personally for run of the mill IDE drives, I buy maxtor. IBM's problem was pretty much with one series of drive in particular too isn't it?

edit:
PC166 do you have some MTBF ratings to prove it? How about some benchmarks where the fujitsu or whatever you brand of choice is the fastest? Western digital (as much as I might not like them) has a very smoking drive with their ide drives with 8MB of cache? Let see some numbers.......

 

[Booster]

IMO, Seagate drives have the best reliability. After all, MS decided to use a Seagate drive in their XBox, and that was for a good reason, I think. I suggest you go with one of their drives instead.

 

[SSP]

Well, I've been reading some threads about this drive at storagereview, and I'm getting a mixed feelings. It has a good record, but some people had bad luck with them (which is not that surprising). The only WD drive I've dealt with was a 1.5Gig Caviar on my old 486 and it works well to this day. Also, some people did mention that the Seagate?s are more reliable, but I don't know how knowledgeable they are. Anyway, thanks for your help. I'll see if they have any similar sized Maxtor or Seagate drives (as long as it?s not out of my price range ).

Thanks again to those who replied.