Other options than WD ?

[Mars]

HDD brand doesn't make any real difference... Hitachi is owned by Western Digital now anyway, the only companies that still produce hard drives are WD, Seagate and Toshiba.

Amazon did some analysis a while back for their data centers, and concluded reliability wasn't worth trying to select for - drives will all eventually fail, so the best recourse is to get the cheapest ones of the size/speed you need, and prepare for their failure.

[Piderman]

Originally Posted by Mars

HDD brand doesn't make any real difference... Hitachi is owned by Western Digital now anyway

Well that news to me and very handy at that.

Personally I have owned around 7 WD's from all most their lines and only had a 2TB green external fail on me, and 2 Seagate's 2TB that I picked up for $75 before the hike and they have been running great.

Between the random chance of failures and your own wear and tear on a computer there is no "better" hhd anymore just find that awesome sale and get a lot of 'em.

[enaberif]

Originally Posted by Piderman

Well that news to me and very handy at that.

Personally I have owned around 7 WD's from all most their lines and only had a 2TB green external fail on me, and 2 Seagate's 2TB that I picked up for $75 before the hike and they have been running great.

Between the random chance of failures and your own wear and tear on a computer there is no "better" hhd anymore just find that awesome sale and get a lot of 'em.

Segate has Maxtor and Samsung
WD has Hitatchi

[great_big_abyss]

Originally Posted by NyteOwl

(I have an 80MB Seagate from 1987] that is still in use)

????? How expensive was that in 1987??

[JD]

Originally Posted by enaberif

Segate has Maxtor and Samsung
WD has Hitatchi

It's sad really, we've ended up with a duopoloy in the hard drive industry.

[NyteOwl]

A quick little consolidation diagram of the HDD industry to the best of my recollection. There were a couple of other companies that just disappeared (liek PrarieTek) or quit making HDD's (like HP).

IBM -----+
          \
Hitachi ---+-----+
                  \
Western Digital ---+-+------------------------>
                  / /
Tandon ----------+ /
                  /
Imprimis --------+

Samsung --------------+
                       \
Connor -------------+   \
                     \   \
Seagate -------------+--+-+---+-+------------->
                       /     / /
Maxtor -----+------+--+     / /
           /      /        / /
Quantum --+      /        / /
                /        / /
Miniscribe --+-+        / /
            /          / /
Rodime ----+          / /
                     / /
Control Data Corp --+ /
                     /
Micropolis ---+-----+

Toshiba -----+------------------------------>
            /
Fujitsu ---+

[grinder]

If Seagate's RMA process sucked as bad as their hard-drives... you couldn't pay me to use a Seagate product. However, their RMA process is very fast and painless if you call their 1 800 number instead of using their HDD testing software.

I do urge all users to have proper backup and data-retention habits no matter what your HDD preference may be.

[Desiato]

Personal experiences with hard drives is usually meaningless. While I'm sure many of us have reached the right conclusion, few can prove it; not without experience with hundreds of retail drives from different batches.

Even then, half the dorks who work in PC shops don't handle drives with care. Who knows what a mail-order drive might go through before and during transit. And don't get me started about most end-users I've witness handle and install drives...

There are infamous exceptions, of course. Sometimes it's clear a line of drives is defective such as in the Deskstar fiasco.

For what it's worth, I like non-green Western Digital drives.

Originally Posted by grinder

I do urge all users to have proper backup and data-retention habits no matter what your HDD preference may be.

Best advice.

[moocow]

I had 4 RMA drives coming back from Seagate. Took longer than I liked but other wise pretty painless. 2 of those drives were RMA once already but got killed by my 3Ware RAID card. You just have to ship it to a UPS depot in Ontario and they are forwarded somewhere and it only costed $15 using Fedex Ground from YVR. I'm interested in Hitachi since their 7100.D is the only desktop drive compatible with my RAID card but worry that WD will kill their entire line. Reading the press release from Samsung, the deal with Seagate is that Seagate will supply Sammy with drives. I interpret this as Seagate killing off Sammy designs completely.