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What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

picbits
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What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

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...
19 REPLIES 19
Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

None,  buy an SSD  Wink
Oldjim
Resting Legend
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Registered: ‎15-06-2007

Re: What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

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
picbits
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Re: What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

Quote from: purleigh
None,  buy an SSD   Wink

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 Wink
I can handle the 20 seconds Linux takes to start up once every year or two 😛
PowerLee
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Re: What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

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  Cool
I do use a Crucial M4 SSD as the system drive.
rongtw
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Re: What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

i have a OCZ  SSD ,, now Toshiba i believe ,  had for near 3 years had no problems  Wink  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 Smiley
must admit i used to use  nowt but WD ,, especially the Veloicraptor Smiley
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Oldjim
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Re: What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

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
VileReynard
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Re: What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

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

"In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was Aardvark."

Mav
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Re: What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

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.

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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear - Mark Twain
He who feared he would not succeed sat still

picbits
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Re: What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

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.
rongtw
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Re: What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

interesting reading here  Wink
http://lifehacker.com/the-most-and-least-reliable-hard-drive-brands-1505797966
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Oldjim
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Re: What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

*/cough
See the link in the first post
picbits
Rising Star
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Re: What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

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

Re: What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

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 ?
rongtw
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Re: What hard drive should I buy ? (Interesting reading)

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  Tongue
Asus ROG Hero Vii Z97 , Intel i5 4690k ,ROG Asus Strix 1070,
samsung 850evo 250gig , WD black 2 TB . Asus Phoebus sound ,
16 gig Avexir ram 2400 , water cooling Corsair H100i gtx ,
Corsair 750HXI Psu , Phanteks Enthoo pro case .