# Which hard drive is the best?



## HaTcH (Jul 9, 2007)

I've seen a lot of mention in other threads about this person has had a bad experience with x and this person has had a bad experience with y... etc.

So, by quality alone, what manufacturer do you trust the most?


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## tesfox (Jul 9, 2007)

I've had very good expierences with Western Digital and segate, but i've onlygot 2 seagates and on the order or 6 or 7 western digitals.  Seagate offers a 5 year warranty to WD's 1, but something about that just screams to me 'Your drive _will_ die in the next 5 years'.


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## CyberFoxx (Jul 9, 2007)

Personally, I trust Seagate over the other companies. Why? I got a 20MB MFM Seagate drive, that still works. Maxtor/Quantum isn't too bad, although they're noisy as all hell. I wouldn't trust Hitachi with my life. (Remember the IBM "Deathstar" drives? Yeah, Hitachi made those.) The old, old Western Digital drives were horrible for not lasting more than a month, I remember going through several of their 3GB Caviar drives. I do own a couple of WD's newer drives, and I've yet to have a problem with them so far, so I guess they cleaned up their act.

BTW, Maxtor was bought up by Seagate in 2006. Thankfully, Seagate doesn't include the Noise Generation Technology from the Maxtor drives in their own.


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## Litre (Jul 9, 2007)

I trust Seagate. All the Caviars from WD I bought died within a month (one was within a week). I've yet to have an issue with Seagate drives.


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## Janglur (Jul 9, 2007)

Going by brand with HDDs is like going by cars by country.  It's just not accurate.

The fastest non-commercial harddrive on the market remains the Raptor.  Only a tiny quantity beat it at STR (Sustained Transfer Rate), which only looks pretty in benchmarks.  It's 5.2ms seek time still beats any non-10k RPM drive hands down for the speed at which the system works.


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## tesfox (Jul 9, 2007)

Ah, but what about the 15k RPM seagate cheetah?


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## DuncanFox (Jul 9, 2007)

tesfox said:
			
		

> Seagate offers a 5 year warranty to WD's 1, but something about that just screams to me 'Your drive _will_ die in the next 5 years'.



Why?  That's just bad business.  You don't want to have to do warranty replacements, they cost money.  You want your warranty to last _less_ than the expected failure time.  A five-year warranty says to me, "The manufacturer doesn't expect this to fail within five years, because if it did, they'd have to spend money to replace it."

Besides, here's what happened:  Seagate, Western Digital, and Maxtor all used to have 3-year warranties on their hard drives.  A few years ago, WD and Maxtor dropped their warranties to one year.  On this news, Seagate increased theirs to five.

That's why I buy Seagate.  (That, and I've had several WD *and* Maxtor drives fail when they were _just_ out of warranty.  Toshiba, too.)


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## tesfox (Jul 9, 2007)

Point.  But bear in mind that i have a caviar 320 that's going on 4 years now with no problems.


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## net-cat (Jul 9, 2007)

Some OEM Western Digital drives over a certain size (250GB or more, if I recall) offer a 3 year warranty. 

I work at a computer store. We don't see a lot of Seagate drives going bad, but we don't sell that many Seagates. We see quite a few Western Digitals, but we also sell quite a few computers with Western Digitals in them, and that's our default replacement drive. (WD is generally cheaper than Seagate.) We see inordinately large numbers of Maxtor drives, though. We don't see many Hitachi drives, but they aren't terribly popular as they've been unable to shake the "Deathstar" reputation.


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## DavidN (Jul 9, 2007)

Like most everyone, I'd go for Seagate and Western out of that list - I've only just realized that all three of my hard drives are different brands. None of them have failed, but the Western Digital one is the one that I've had the longest, closely followed by the Seagate - and I use the Hitachi one as an external drive, so it's only used occasionally and I've only had it a few months.


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## Zero_Point (Jul 9, 2007)

I've got 2 Seagate drives installed right now. Quiet, dependable, affordable. I've had bad experiences with WD and Quantum, but some of my friends swear by WD and Hitachi. -v(o_0)v-


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## Cybergarou (Jul 10, 2007)

I've got a couple WD drives that have been with me a while. One has been going for 8 years, though it only gets light use now. Too small. The Maxtor drive I had died a horrible screeching death after 3 years.

The other two brands I've had no experience with as I often buy drives during sales and they never seem to be on sale when I look.


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## net-cat (Jul 10, 2007)

I had some ten year old WD drives. They worked right up until, well, let's just say they went out with a non-internally-caused "bang."


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## Kougar (Jul 10, 2007)

If you check WD's page they offer only a 1-year warranty on Retail kit drives... what you find on a store shelf. WD offers a 3-year warranty on Bulk drives, usually the OEM drives. Warranty LinkÂ Â Seagate has extended the Maxtor warranty to 3 years as well.

Everyone will have a different experience, even in my usual computer forum hangouts my fellow reviewers tend to disagree a bit since a few have had good experiences with WD drives.

Personally my own experience is that except for the older WD drives I got before Y2K that still work even today, I've owned several retail kits and either myself or the people I offloaded them to have had them all die within 3 months of the 1 year warranty expiring. I've even had issues with the refurb replacement drive I got sent for the one WD drive that luckily had a 3-year warranty on it. The refurb was displaying the same click & shut off routine that the first one did, which locks up the OS within a few moments as it was the drive XP was installed on.

I had that one WD, one Maxtor, one Hitachi, a RMA replacement of an IBM (Hitachi) Deathstar I acquired, and one Seagate in that same computer from about that same time period, and so far only that WD and the offloaded WDs went out. I have never owned a Samsung Spinpoint drive or a Fujitsu drive though. After the WD headaches I made it a point to only buy Seagates or ortherwise Hitachi drives as Hitachi also offers 5 year warranties on some of their drives. I've bought four more Seagates to date and have been happy with them, the only drive to ever die on me (*so far*) were WD drives, but they will all die in the end really... :wink:


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## net-cat (Jul 10, 2007)

I've always gone with the OEM drives. (For both WD and Seagate.) They cost a fraction of what the retail kits cost. (They're usually only available online, but you can find them in a few mom and pop type computer shops.)


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## darkdoomer (Jul 11, 2007)

well, im pretty ok with my seagates. maxtors ares sold at  reasonnable price but one of them has began to loose sectors after some years. it still works but scandisk helps keeping it stable.

one i wouldnt recommend : ibm.

most people i know with ibm dtta , including myself had a problem, especially headcrashes.
( not to confuse ibm and hitachu. if both makes same product, ibm seems to doin' it wrong with this one. )


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## tesfox (Jul 11, 2007)

darkdoomer said:
			
		

> well, im pretty ok with my seagates. maxtors ares sold at  reasonnable price but one of them has began to loose sectors after some years. it still works but scandisk helps keeping it stable.
> 
> one i wouldnt recommend : ibm.
> 
> ...



Hitachi supplied the drives for IBM's "Deathstar" line.  Personally, i wouldn't trust either... I'll Stick to my caviars.


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## brokenfox (Jul 11, 2007)

At my work we only sell Seagate, and I personally would only trust Seagate. With there reliability, five year warranty and easy returns in case anything does go wrong they are the best.


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## Zero_Point (Jul 11, 2007)

darkdoomer said:
			
		

> well, im pretty ok with my seagates. maxtors ares sold at  reasonnable price but one of them has began to loose sectors after some years. it still works but scandisk helps keeping it stable.



Yeah, a friend of mine had that problem with a 250GB WD drive he got from Office Max. It worked great... For a week or two. Then half the sectors went bad. :V


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## net-cat (Jul 11, 2007)

Y'know what? The same thing happened to a 250GB Seagate drive I had. I RMA'd it and all was good, but still. It was annoying. It's the only one of several Seagates I've had that died, though. (3 250's and 1 400.)


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## HaTcH (Jul 12, 2007)

To be honest, my reason for creating this topic was to see how people would respond XD 

I figured Seagate would be the win. As far as I know Maxtor is now WD too. And Quantum merged with Maxtor previously. 

Anyway, I have Seagate Drives from the mid 90s that still run (690MB to 4.3GB), I've got Maxtor, WD, and Seagate drives in all my computers. The only one that EVER crapped out was a WD Cavaiar (and that was after about 8 years of life, and was possibly brought on by a bad PS). Some of my other computers have the Quantum Bigfoot drives which still work (albeit loudly)... I've got a server computer which I found in a dumpster that has a 4 GB SCSI, Seagate 10k Cheetah. My desktop has 2 Maxtor SATA drives, a WD IDE, and a Maxtor IDE. 

So really, I've had good experiences with hard drives. The most important thing to me at this point is value, How many gigs/dollar do ya get? What goes wrong with hard drives is often just physical abuse. You're shutting down the computer by holding in the power button ALL THE TIME, or your persistence to move the computer around while it's still on... Anything. I voted WD just because.


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## net-cat (Jul 12, 2007)

HaTcH said:
			
		

> As far as I know Maxtor is now WD too.


Actually, it was Seagate that bought out Maxtor. (At work, we were worried that Seagates would become the new Maxtors, but that hasn't happened. )


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## HaTcH (Jul 12, 2007)

Kay  I knew one of the big guys bought the other...


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## Shapeshifter (Jul 13, 2007)

Seagate is the only thing I'll buy. WD makes a good drive, but second best is still, well, not first.

Hitachi... two words: "Death Stars".
Maxtor: well, at least they're owned by Seagate now.
Quantum: *shudder*


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## LLiz (Jul 13, 2007)

I voted Seagate because I buy lots of them and rarely ever have a problem.

Recently I've gotten people some Samsungs which have been quite good, they're really fast and quiet, and I am yet to have a problem with a Samsung either.

Western Digital is also good, I've had a 160GB drive from them for a few years now. It was in a 3.5" case at one stage and dropped it a couple of times (while switched off), it still goes just fine. It's back in a desktop PC now and performing great.

Maxtor used to be HORRIBLE, I've never had one that's lasted more than a couple of months, and don't worry aout trying to get them replaced. Now that Maxtor have been bought out by Seagate I actually hear that they're ok. I'll probably never try one again, but apparently Maxtor are great with external storage.

Ultimatley, it doesn't matter which brand you go with, hard drives fail at some point, and some fail early, irrespective of what brand you buy. What I am getting at is that, yes some brands are better than others but don't ever buy a drive ever expecting that you won't have problems with it just because it's "X" brand.


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## yak (Jul 13, 2007)

I trust Western Digital.
It's the least complained upon drives 3 of my friends who work on selling and repairing computers know off. 
I also have a 120GB drive in which i accidentally punctured a hole in, and it's working for me just fine for over 4 years already.


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