Hard Drives

[FluxMaven]

I was wondering what hard drives people use. I used to avoid Seagate and only get Western Digital, but recent reviews for every manufacture seem to be mostly bad. So Is the best bet to just get the cheapest one with a decent warranty and cross your fingers?

 

[heddhunter]

I was wondering what hard drives people use. I used to avoid Seagate and only get Western Digital, but recent reviews for every manufacture seem to be mostly bad. So Is the best bet to just get the cheapest one with a decent warranty and cross your fingers?

The problem is all manufacturers get a stroke of bad luck from time to time. Some people swear by Seagate, some swear at it

The only correct answer is to have backups and lots of them.

Right now I've got an OCZ SSD, and HDDs from Samsung, Hitachi, and Western Digital. I've got time machine and carbon copy cloner backups. Everything really super important is also copied to Dropbox or Amazon S3.

Get the cheapest drive you can find, the odds are it will fail eventually. Just be prepared for it. Warranties are good, but how good are you going to feel about trading in your drive that just died for another drive from the same manufacturer? (Personally, I don't care. Like I said, all drives die, just be prepared.)

 

[iUserosx]

I've 4 HDDs for my use........

1. 500GB Seagate
2. 1TB Seagate
3. 1TB Seagate
4. 1TB WD

The first 3 are attached to my rig......first one for windows....2nd one for OS X (SL and Lion).....3rd one for media files......4th one is converted to external drive using an enclosure which I use to keep all my softwares backup

And I can say I'm having no problems with them till date

 

[Druac]

Booting on Agility 3 60GB, one each for OS X & Windows 7.

Seagate Barracuda 1TB for Data Drive on OS X
WD Black 1TB for Data Drive on Windows 7
WD Green 2TB to backup both

 

[ReallyFantastic]

I've always felt that it didn't matter.

 

[ebm]

I've been burned by all the above.

I have a mixture of all and have a 3TB to backup everything and have a 2nd smaller 500 backup of all the important stuff in case original and 3TB give up the ghost.

 

[Bill the Cat]

Iv'e only had around ten or so drives since the 20GB Maxtor that came with the Gig Ethernet G4 I bought in 2000. I've only had one drive failure, which was the next one I bought, a 80GB IBM Deskstar. This was the infamous "Deathstar" made in Hungary. Sudden death! After about six months I was on the phone with the web developer who recommended it when I heard the head plunge down and scrape across the platter!! This was a widespread problem and the drive lead IBM to exit the consumer drive market. They sold the Deskstar name to Hitachi. I'm surprised they wanted to use it.

 

[Flybye]

Seagate.

If your Western Digital drive dies 3 months after buying it, WD sends you a replacement drive with a 90 day warranty.
If your Seagate drive dies 3 months after buying it, Seagate sends you a replacement drive and is warrantied for the remainder of the warranty period.

 

[gwynnebaer]

I use whatever has a reasonable (3 yr) warranty and is on sale when I need a new drive. Currently that means both Seagate and WD drives. I used to buy Green* drives because they were quieter but now that I put the workhorse system in the garage a few years back, I buy fast and cheap. I've had bad luck with 5400-rpm and 7200-rpm intermixed in a RAID-5 (for what I imagine are obvious reasons - I'm lazy, what can I say?)

I've had drives of all manufacturers fail: Seagate, WD, LaCie, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Winchester, you name it, it's died, and often spectacularly. Recently I've had SSD drives fail as well; it's a fact of hard drive life, whether it spins or doesn't.

I've taken advantage of the return policy for WD and Seagate many times, and they seem to work pretty much interchangeably. Their policies vary, but both have a "quick replace" policy if you can float the cost on a credit card.

Drives are expendable; you need to consider them to be basically interchangeable and prone-to-failure, and everything resolves itself after that. As drives get larger and larger, the "stakes per drive" increases (that is, the potential loss per spindle is much higher).

My least favorite failures were in the "$1000 / GB" days (approx 1995) when a drive that could hold an ENTIRE GB was about the most expensive thing I could possibly imagine. Those were really painful days because the backup strategy was zip disks or, gulp, floppies.

Have backups: I have a large software-raid for cost-effective performance, and a couple of 2+TB USB drives for interchangeable backups. I *never* let myself have only one copy of anything, and most of the time, I have three (on system, on another disk). The crucial things I keep on Dropbox in addition (for a total of four copies).

Having to tell my wife that I lost all of the kids digital pictures, etc. because a drive failed is not a conversation I ever want to have.

 

[andrec]

right now, seagate and wd are having about the same reliability and it seems all of them tend to fail quickly.
the late ones produce an insane amount of heat, a drive killer, not to mention that turning them on in the summer
will raise the temperature of the workplace quickly - and you need to pay for room cooling too.

i was a fan of seagate, got a few of 7200.10 and 11 that still work today. I got two seagates in late 2010 and 2011 that started
developing bad sectors and major errors as soon as the drive fills more than 65%. got a 5 year warranty blown by the dealer
that pried open the case so I could not get a replacement on an external drive. seagate didn't want to hear about my story and killed the issue.

WD greens also run hot. I don't know why, since green would mean "energy efficient", and heat is the least energy efficient happening.
they work well, are noisier than seagates at the same size. greens are fine for applications that are not i/o hungry.

for my hackintosh got two 1TB seagates, and they seem to work. they were intended for a raid, but lost the urge to get SSD for system.
lots of heat from those too, @ 37-40 C at idle, which is insane imho.

raid your important data. warranty doesn't mean crap when you lose 1TB of useful data. on top of that, you could get some dork
at the computer store "fixing" your drive on warranty by remapping bad blocks.

long story short, find one size that you like. treat the drive as expensive and think about your needs more than impressing your friends
with a signature. do you really need fast drives? do you really need quiet drives? do you need "green" drives? think well, buy well.

everything you find are WD's and Seagate. This could mean they are the most profitable. You could go for Hitachis or Fujitsu if you get
them. I heard good things about Fujitsu.

The poll is slightly inaccurate since Samsung drives are now part of Seagate