What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

[#1]

I have been in the IT industry for many many years (20+).
In the early days, Seagate drives were great, Hitachi Drives clicked lots and the Deathstar drive had a lot to answer for, Bigfoot drives were cheap and slow but reliable and Connor Drives still existed (and we hated them).
Maxtor were pretty good and ground-breaking technology - we sold them in nice big boxes as kits with brackets and various software to make them "more compatible".
Then things changed .....
Samsung entered the market and for a long time were fantastic drives. Warranties on drives were 3-5 years. Manufacturers stood by their products and prices dropped steadily while capacity increased. Then manufacturers bought other manufacturers and currently many drives only have a 12 month warranty and choice is really limited to Seagate, Toshiba, Samsung, Western Digital and Hitachi
However ....... Seagate now own/manufacture Samsung and Western Digital own HGST (Hitachi). That leaves three manufacturers ?
Seagate - every recent Seagate drive I've had has failed prematurely. As Samsung are now "Seagate" I'm now avoiding those too.
Western Digital - not too bad. I've moved to WD after the Samsung buyout but even then their warranties were cut by a year or two - are they not confident in their own products ? I recently had a 2TB external WD Elements drive fail just out of warranty - it didn't have a hard life but was run continuously for two years. A friend had her 2TB Elements drive fail totally just inside the 2 year warranty. Not too inspiring.
Toshiba - we used to have a joke in the industry that they were so bad, not even Toshiba would use them inside their own laptops. I'm still wary after a few bad experiences with Toshiba drives (2.5") but maybe they have got better ?
Interesting reading from a firm that stores Petabytes of data for clients - it kind of mirrors my experience with the above manufacturers in the past.
http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/?fb_comment_id=fbc_646358558753528...

[#2]

None,  buy an SSD 

[#3]

My last one was a WD Caviar Green but I see that the warranty is now only 2 years but the black is 5 years but costs about 50% more

[#4]

Quote from: purleigh

None,  buy an SSD

I use a SSD on one of my laptops - the main thing I buy storage for is my servers which wouldn't really benefit from an SSD
I can handle the 20 seconds Linux takes to start up once every year or two 😛

[#5]

Had my 1TB Seagate Barracuda 700.12 drive fail earlier this year & it was only about 4 years old so out of warranty - first & last Seagate product ill ever buy.
Replaced it with a Weston Digital Caviar black of same size, these come with 5 year warranty.
Already had a WD exactly the same spec installed as my system back up drive so my data was safe  
I do use a Crucial M4 SSD as the system drive.

[#6]

i have a OCZ  SSD ,, now Toshiba i believe ,  had for near 3 years had no problems    but only has my OS and game on .
all other programs and other files are held on my Samsung Spinpoint 1TB which again i have had over 3 years and no hickups
must admit i used to use  nowt but WD ,, especially the Veloicraptor

[#7]

The graph is the most useful bit - it shows that the WD failures nearly all happen in the first 4 months (well within warranty) and then are very reliable

[#8]

I always try for Seagate.
Provided you take proper backups the failure rate is not very important.
"Failures are always unexpected".

[#9]

One of my drives is making an awful racket (clicking) at various times. Haven't been able to work out which yet as I've been too busy to investigate but I can narrow it down to one of 5 and neither of them have anything too important on.
Will have more time to properly check it out next week.

[#10]

I'm in the market for either 6 x 2TB drives or 6 x 3TB drives but keeping an eye out for some decent drives at a good price.

[#11]

interesting reading here 
http://lifehacker.com/the-most-and-least-reliable-hard-drive-brands-1505797966

[#12]

*/cough
See the link in the first post

[#13]

*/ cough - I wasn't saying anything lmao.

[#14]

Quote from: DomS

I'm in the market for either 6 x 2TB drives or 6 x 3TB drives but keeping an eye out for some decent drives at a good price.

What are you going to do with them ?
Will they be used for slower reliable mass storage,  or do you need higher performance for doing perhaps video processing ?

[#15]

Ahummm ,, first linky is "what hard drive should i buy "
my linky altho is same web page is " the most reliable HD "
also if you read the comments as well as the page it helps