HARD DRIVE EXPERTS- Lets have it out. Who make the most RELIABLE/STABLE?

[Nemesis2038]

IBM/HITACHI = TRASH and they dont support you when you have problems with their drives. I wish them bankruptcy. No other company do I wish this more upon.

SEAGATE = Excellent and Probably the Quietest drives. Great for TIVO.

MAXTOR = Excellent but head movement can get noisy over time. Meaning not good for TIVO's. Great for X-box beacuse I believe these run cooler at 7200rpm than any other drives.

WESTERN DIGITAL = NEAR EXCELLENT but I do hear of occasional bad batches. Never myself personally.

SAMSUNG = Often Forgotten. Excellent never had one die yet. Never a media problem. Not the fastest of the group but probably the most reliable and as quiet as Seagate. Another great choice for TIVO. I even have a 120meg yes MEG drive from ages ago that I would bet is perfect to this day.

TOSHIBA = Best Laptop Drives but I dont have much to compare them too since most of my laptop sized drives are Toshiba.

 

[Nemesis2038]

One thing I left out.

Western Digital Drives do not seem to play nice together on the same IDE channels. Thats the only reason I cant give WD the super thumbs up.

 

[Cerb]

Actually the Samsungs, when set for max performance, aren't too shy of the WDs and Hitachis. So far I'm very happy w/ mine .
Toshiba...well, Toshiba also makes some of the 2nd-best laptops around (1st being IBM), and with the mobile market growing and desktops...not, I don't see them going into anything wider than 2.5".

I've never had issues with WDs on the same IDE channel, save once, but a BIOS flash on the mobo fixed it.
However, the 80GBs dropping our in RAID has me a bit leery of using them as such in the future, with Seagate and Samsung having such nice drives out.

 

[Stunt]

This is a horrid question to ask people in a forum...we only know what we have experience with.

If you want my history, i've had a WD and a maxtor die on me, my ibm 60gxp is my longest running drive and i currently run a Hitachi 7k250 along wiht the ibm

Therefore i would be recommending a 60gxp, which i'm assuming you dont want. But i do suggest the reliability survey at storagereview.com as reliability not only changes with brand, but family and even model!
the WB series: 120gb JB =44%, 120gb BB = 57% (just less cache)

I say check there if reliability is VERY important.

 

[gsellis]

I like Seagate and WD. I loath IBM and worry about Maxtor. I have seen lots of the drives across generations, usually above 500 of each. WD I like the best. The only Seagate I had that was a problem was a 46MB drive that had stiction problems (it is sitting across the cube with the cover off - I have seen smaller disk rotors on econo-boxes than those drive platters )

Toshibas are nice. I just cannot judge as they get so much abuse that it is hard to tell if it was the drive or the driver(user) that was the problem.

 

[lavagirl669]

I personally like Seagate
quiet, reliable and NO problems

WD....ok too..but encountered a couple small issues with that
and it makes more noise.

 

[beatle]

As others have said, you won't get an accurate picture of reliability by asking a few (or even a hundred) people on a forum. Storagereview's database is the closest thing you'll get to a decent sample size.

That said, you CAN buy a drive with a longer warranty, or buy a drive from a manufacturer with a good/fast RMA process. Plan for EVERY drive you buy to fail, regardless of who makes it and what interface it uses. There are no "crash proof" drives.

The only manufacturer I won't buy a drive from is Hitachi. This is not because of their (IBM's) bad track record in past years, but because when you DO lose a drive, it takes over a month to get a replacement, and they will not cross ship, even if you ask them to charge you for the replacement until you get your new drive. I buy my storage drives based on noise and GB/$ (mostly Maxtor, some WD), my Raptor I bought for speed.

 

[Cat]

We've had many 80GB and 120GB WD drives die at work, and my external WD 80GB died with 3 days of purchase. Western Digital has a decent RMA policy; I'd listen to beatle about Hitachi's horrible customer service. These drives get worked hard, often running in dual-cpu environments, handling tons of swap and random access ( very large military models, 20 GB+ particle simulations that are written to disk, etc.)

We all run RAID1, since no one likes having downtime because of disk failure, and have backup servers. I'd backup religiously if you're dealing with a non-SCSI environment.

 

[TechJunkie95242]

Another Vote for Seagate..

I got a 120GB 8Mb Cache 7,200 works great. Had for a couple years now.

 

[mrbios]

Frankly, I generally a brand of drive that has been the most reliable for me in the last little while for me. I've stopped using Seagate's for now, since I've had 3 drives die on me within a couple month span (All different drives, not the same one that got RMA'd a few times).

I don't mind the WD Caviar series of drives, but I find they a more expensive, and much louder than comparable Maxtor and Seagate drives. Raptors a fine drives though, and, to me at least, seemed quieter than the Caviar drives. Might just be because I have an Antec Sonata though.

For most of the last few years, I've pretty well bought mostly Maxtor drives. They've been extremely reliable, and are quite quiet as well. I didn't buy their drives for a while there, because they kinda pissed me off for a while. I had a 20GB D740X drive that died on me before the 1 year warranty thing came into effect. All old drives were to keep their original 3 year warranty. But when I tried to RMA it, they said it was out of warranty. I was bitter and didn't touch another Maxtor drive for probably a year. Anyways, probably about a year later I found that drive again, and decided to look up the warranty on it just for the hell of it. Sure enough, it was suddenly under warranty again, so I RMA'd it. I do like Maxtor's RMA policy as well. I recieved my cross-shipped drives within 5 days usually, and I live way out in the boonies in British Columbia, Canada.

 

[MemberSince97]

Seagate und WD ...

 

[oldman420]

seagate and wd are the best maxtor fail for me quite a lot seems like they get too hot or something

 

[Markfw]

I think that this thread has proved only one thing.... Backups rule, and any HD (including SCSI) may die. I have a Micropolis 7200 rpm 9 gig SCSI that died one year out ! Other than that Maxtor and Seagate are tops on my book statistically.