HD IDE recommendations by brand

[puttsthree]

I am looking at buying a new IDE HD (120-250GB). I have been searching the forums to find info about what brands are most reliable, but one thread says Seagate is the best and another one states WD is the best, and so on. All I am looking for is a low cost HD ($75 or less) that has a good track record.

Here is my perceived order reliability by brand.

1. Seagate
2. WD
3. Hitachi

 

[ColKurtz]

All you're going to get are replies by people who had a bad experience with one particular brand, and so will tell you to stay away from that brand. If data loss is your concern, get 2 of whichever drive is cheapest and mirror them.

 

[PurdueRy]

Originally posted by: ColKurtz
All you're going to get are replies by people who had a bad experience with one particular brand, and so will tell you to stay away from that brand. If data loss is your concern, get 2 of whichever drive is cheapest and mirror them.

Bingo. For instance, my worst reliability brand is Seagate at this point. The best is Western Digital followed by MAXTOR in a close second. This isn't what most people would expect but it is from the experience I have had with each brand.

 

[lobbyone]

Just about any hard drives today will last you about 3-5 years, depending on usability. No HD will last forever, I've had hard drives from most manufacturers including IBM and Quantum, and it still works today only because they aren't running 24/7. There will be difference in noise from different brands, I find WD to be clicky, and Samsungs very quiet while Seagates run cooler. Those are just my experiences though, so it may vary from user to user.
Check Newegg.com for some nice deals on HDs

 

[SuperNaruto]

Anything mechanical and generates heat is bound to fail... scsi fails less.. but still fails.. SCSI just uses better parts.. I would get the Seagate ES or WD RE2 series.. above avg than regular SATA/PATA drives but still, like the test seagate did, 20% more prone to failure.. raid up if data is valuable and backup often.

Anyway, Quantum + Maxtor = New Maxtor

New Maxtor + Seagate = New Seagate

I think the 3 players are Seagate, WD and Hitachi.... never own samsung before.. , toshiba and fujitsu has notebook market share.. not much desktop.. fujitsu has server shares

http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2859&p=5


The difference in reliability between typical SATA and real enterprise disks has been proven in a recent test by Seagate. Seagate exposed three groups of 300 desktop drives to high-duty-cycle sequential and random workloads. Enterprise disks list a slightly higher or similar failure rate than desktop drives, but that does not mean they are the same. Enterprise disks are tested for heavy duty highly random workloads and desktop drives are tested with desktop workloads. Seagate's tests revealed that desktop drives failed twice as often in the sequential server tests than with normal desktop use. When running random server or transactional workloads, SATA drives failed four times as often! In other words, it is not wise to use SATA drives for transactional database environments; you need real SCSI/SAS enterprise disks which are made to be used for the demanding server loads.

Even the so called "Nearline" (Seagate) or "Raid Edition" (RE, Western Digital) SATA drives which are made to operate in enterprise storage racks, and which are more reliable than desktop disks, are not made for the mission critical, random transactional applications. Their MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) is still at least 20% lower than typical enterprise disks, and they will show the similar failure rates when used with highly random server workloads as desktop drives.

 

[Matthias99]

I must say I'm a little skeptical of tests run by a HD manufacturer, especially when the results make a competitor's products look bad or would make you want to buy the manufacturer's significantly more expensive hardware line.

Things to consider: if you extended the test out further, you might see that the failure rates even out (eg, pushing the drives hard killed the 'bad eggs' sooner, but they would have failed in another few thousand hours anyway even at a 'desktop' workload.) They also didn't (at least in this summary) show comparable data for SCSI disks -- maybe they also fail 2-4x as much when pushed with a hard workload than a 'desktop' one. And no definition is given here as to what a 'desktop' workload consists of. If they're doing something like having the drives sit idle 50% of the time, any drive would fail far less often running that workload than running a 100% random read/write one. And what were the environmental factors -- were they pushing the drives at high temperature/vibration to induce early failures?

Generally speaking, most 7200RPM SATA/IDE drives are going to be about the same in reliability (barring a few notoriously bad product lines, like the IBM "Deathstar" Deskstar drives from a couple production runs ~5 years ago.) Some will work fine for years, others will fail. Buying expensive SCSI or FC drives will probably give you a little better MTBF, but you'll still get bad drives from time to time. MTBF numbers (and even studies like this) only give statistical data -- the actual amount of time a given drive will run before failing has a huge variance, and there's no way to definitively tell in advance.

If your issue is data security, make regular backups no matter what kind of drives you have. Buying SCSI doesn't make you immune to needing backups.

If you care about uptime, it is far better to buy two cheaper SATA drives and run them in RAID1 (or 3+ and run RAID5/RAID6) than to buy one SCSI drive, even if the SCSI drive is actually more reliable than either of the SATA drives by themselves.

 

[Slick5150]

I always figure most hard drives are about as reliable as each other, meaning, you're always going to find a bad one in the bunch from any manufacturer. So, the best thing to look for is a good warranty on it, and then you're covered.

But as someone mentioned about, getting 2 and mirroring them is an added bonus so that while its being sent back under warranty, you are still up and running.

 

[brikis98]

just to confirm what others have said... i don't think any1 has done a scientific (statistical) analysis comparing these hard drives (which would be a long term and difficult test anyway), so the best you'll get is anecdotal evidence. if reliability is your main concern, you just need to do two things:

1. find a hard drive that best fits your budget and has a good warranty (optionally, one that's fast, quiet, cool, whatever else you care about)
2. buy two (or more) of them and mirror them (or use other versions of RAID that provide good redundancy)

 

[imported_browsing]

Is the mirroring that you guys are talking about simply RAID 1?

 

[brikis98]

Originally posted by: browsing
Is the mirroring that you guys are talking about simply RAID 1?

yup, although if you got more HD's, you could do more advanced versions of RAID as well...

 

[puttsthree]

Thanks for all the responses. I checked newegg, and decided on this one:

Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB 8MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive - OEM

 

[Roguestar]

Originally posted by: ColKurtz
All you're going to get are replies by people who had a bad experience with one particular brand, and so will tell you to stay away from that brand. If data loss is your concern, get 2 of whichever drive is cheapest and mirror them.

One of the most sensible hard-drive related comments I've ever read.

While everyone has their own recommendations, three others say that it's a bad choice and that their failed, etc etc. As far as I'm concerned to take the hearsay on board and mitigate it with something more sensible is your best option, so as previously mentioned I recommend getting two hard drives from one of the three big brands (Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi) and setting it up as a RAID 1 mirror.

There's no point in going for reliability alone because one disk by itself can fail for any number of reasons. If data protection is important to you, you need to seriously consider failsafes and backups such as RAID 1, or regular hard drive images, etc etc.

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: puttsthree
Thanks for all the responses. I checked newegg, and decided on this one: Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 160GB 8MB Cache IDE Ultra ATA100 Hard Drive - OEM

Good choice. The OEM's warranty bears on the problem. Seagate is 5 years.