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What's a reliable brand/series nowadays?

E

eli2k

Member
I bought a 500gb Seagate 7200.11 two months ago from Microcenter, and it was running fine, but then today when I put the computer into hibernate, after bringing it back out the drive decided to die. It spun up fine, but refused to be recognized by the BIOS. Porting it to an external enclosure did not help, either. Looks like everything is 'gone' since I can't interface with the drive. This was a machine that was on maybe 12-15 hours/day and was used for either gaming or Internet, so nothing intensive on the hard drive. And it was kept cool, too, no temperature problems. I have old Seagate 7200.9/.10 that are going okay, maybe those were more reliable.

I'm using a WD 1TB green I had sitting around right now; hopefully that will hold up. I wanted to ask for advice/recommendations of what brand and what line in that brand is reliable nowadays, and which size. It looks like 1.5tb and 1tb have problems all over the place. Should I just go for the smaller sizes from older generation? It'll definitely not be used 24/7, and worse abuse would be bittorrent, but I usually confine it to a small partition and do not run many torrents at the same time.

Thanks,
- Eli
 
I've never done this but have heard putting a drive in the freezer for a while er something like that will make it useable to do some recovery... anyone know the 'freezer trick' procedure?
 
Originally posted by: BTRY B 529th FA BN
...anyone know the 'freezer trick' procedure?
Click to expand...
Know it,
Used it,
It worked for me :thumbsup:


I also remember a trick a friend of mine told me about.
He was a manager of a retail clothing store. He had a computer that wouldn't work.
He called tech support for the store to have a tech sent out.
After some troubleshooting, the tech pulled the HD...
1. Laid it cover down, on a smooth floor.
2. Gave the drive a couple of good spins with it flat on the floor.
3. Reinstalled the HD.

My friend said the PC began working after that visit.
BTW, I have never used the "spin trick", but I've got a couple of drives I'm going to try.
 
Thanks. I'll give SpinRite a try, but this isn't a mechanical problem. Looking around online, it's supposedly some firmware problem that locks up the hard drive, preventing it from being detected again.

I checked on Newegg for the Black series; why do some have 3yr (500gb) warranty, and others have 5yr (640gb, 1000gb) warranty? Also, are OEM drives 'better' than retail drives, any different selection process. I've usually stuck with retail.
 
OEM just means it's the bare drive instead of coming with a manual, cable, etc.

Anyway, all Black series are supposed to have 5 year warranties. The 640GB and 1TB are recommended because they have denser (IE less) platters, so they are faster. The regular 640GBs (any brand) should be fast as well.
 
What do you think of the WD6400AAKS (the Caviar series)? They use two platters, also, like the black one (WD6401AALS).
 
* Nice
* Yes

* The WD6400AAKS "Blue" has only 16MB cache vs 32MB on the "Black"
* The WD6400AAKS "Blue" has only a 3 year warranty vs 5 years on the "Black"

TechReport Review
"<a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15363">Speaking of the VelociRaptor, the Caviar Black inherits one new trick from Western Digital's 10K-RPM mini-monster.
The Black features not one, but two processors, effectively doubling the horsepower it has available to calculate how to move, collect, and cache data on the drive.</a>"
 
Ah, forgot about the warranty aspect, that is important, too. It's just strange, that on Newegg the Black model does not have the mass amount of reviews that the Blue model has (90 vs 1000).
 
Newegg reviews tend to cluster around popular components.
By popular I mean those posted in the Hot Deals forum. :laugh:

You know how geeks are...
When a price differential gets wide enough, they will sacrifice performance to save a few bucks.
 
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