What's your most reliable hard disk recommendation? 3

[zbnet]

I've been building PCs for a few years now (part-time 'hobby business') and have been using Maxtor disks for most of this time, with excellent reliability. I like Maxtor because they are a good compromise between price and quality, and they have good diag utilities and bios-replacement utilities for big drives.

Until recently, when more than usual have started developing problems. I've had enough hassle to maybe consider changing my default choice - has anyone else noticed an increase failure rates of Maxtor drives? What are your recommendations for a new default drive - preferably one with the same characteristics, ie medium price (not the cheapest and not the most expensive), but with good quality and longevity?

 

[norty303]

Build all my systems with Barracudas now and no problems, and I can't seem to be able to stop adding them to my home PC either.....all jammed in together aswell and no heat probs....

Last one was a 120gb 7200.7 and I'm in love......

 

[MrMinkey]

I had a Seagate Barracuda, came with the computer. It died after 15 months service. I replaced it with a Maxtor, and it died in 2 weeks. Yes I get a replacement, but why replace it to possibly happen again, 2 weeks or a month from now? Its a free replacement, I guess, $25 for something, but I lost some information. So like everyone else, I will be looking at Spinpoint, even Seagate, maybe WD, but with 8m cache and 3 yrs warrenty. This is such a pain, because I have a an old PII with the same harddrvie for like 4-5 years and my old PI is still in business, longer than that with the same harddrive. One is a WD and the other is a Maxtor. "Figure that

 

[garebo]

Actually, my experience with hard drive failure is a lot more of reading various polls, mag reports, etc, etc, and threads like this, rather than actual experience.
I have had only one hard drive go bad on me in over 10 yrs.
I mentioned above i am moving away from maxtor, but thats only because of what i have read, but when you read the same thing in 10 different places then i think you should pay attention to what is said. As for my personal experiences, i can say that maxtor, west dig, samsung, and seagate are all fine drives. Maybe the only ones to steer clear of are certain IBM deathstar, excuse me, deckstar drives, i forget the exact ones, seems to me its around the 40 gig mark, but im not sure on that. And there are a few fujitsu models that fujitsu quietly replaced, even in advance, for its larger customers, again i forget which models, i think it was 20 or 30 gig drives, but not certain, but there was definitely a prob with them.
As for 80 gig and up, so far i think that they are all fine.

 

[jurgen36]

Well I like to give my experience as well. We have a total of 480 systems in my Uni. They all came with dual 80 Gbyte Seagate Sata drives. 819 of the Seagate Sata drives drives failed within the first 4 weeks. I had my techs fitt Maxtor Sata drives ATA 150 with 8 Mbyte cache. Over the last 9 months not a single of the Maxtor drives failed. Maybe the 8 Mbyte cache drives are build to closer spec's. So this is my experience. The Seagate sata drives are only good as boat anchors. Regards

Jurgen

 

[ceh4702]

I have started using PC Cases with better airflow. The case I have now has the mount for the hard drive down low in front of where the fan pulls the air through the vents on the case. Air Flow around the hard drive is key. I also have a 120mm exhaust fan which came stock with the case. My Case is an Antec SLK3700AMB.

I also think some of this may be the quality of the power supply. I have been using Antec Power Supplies when it comes time to replace them.

I have used mostly Western Digital Hard Drives. The newer drives with more data on one platter may be making some problems.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[JimInKS]

Thought I would also give my experience with Maxtor. Just had a DiamondMax Plus 8 20G drive fail. The drive was almost a year old, but had only been in service about a month. The system was running fine, then a blue screen and drive is dead, not even recognized by BIOS. I can hear it spin up and try to load the heads, but nothing.

The first hard drive "infant mortality" that I can remember in a long time. Manf Date is March 2003

 

[zbnet]

Since I started the thread, I've had a similar experience with one of the last Maxtor's I bought, back in March 2003 - it's just started failing, a few weeks after the guarantee runs out. I've been buying Samsungs and Seagates for the last couple of months...

 

[sunny3]

My experience..:-
in the last 5 years I have had 3 Maxtors die...suddenly!out of warranty.

Have mainly used Ibm...now hitachi...and have never had a problem with them...Have had 3 drives 1 scsi and 2 ide 7200 2mb cache

The new system I am Building will house Ibm 20gb as main windows drive.
120gb seagate barracuda 7200 8mb cache...(storage drive)
80 gb maxtor 7200 8mb cache (was a freebie from a friend)additional storage drive.

So far so good ...Don't have much faith in the maxtor though!

 

[danomac]

Update on my experience with the Seagate Barracuda line - purchased two drives, one died in 24 days.... I'm not impressed.

I won't be getting Seagates anymore.

D

 

[sunny3]

From reading this ...seems no one has a bad thing to say about the samsung range...
I think this will be the next choice when the time comes.

 

[garebo]

Sunny3, you are right, not one bad thing said about Samsung drives.
And i know one tech wont use anything else, maybe he is onto something.

However, from reading the above comments, it seems that perhaps the 8mb versions of drives are better built as well.

That is what i get out of reading all these posts, good learning experience here, thanks for starting this thread.

 

[ceh4702]

Only hard drive I had that really failed was an IBM Deskstar hard drive. Maybe we should call it the

DEATHSTAR . . . #$@&^%!

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[garebo]

you are NOT alone. The deckstar almost killed IBM hard drive sales, no-one in the know would touch them and others like me that heard about them just stayed away from deckstars as i couldnt remember exactly which ones were bad and which were not.

And same with fujitsu, just not to the same degree as the deckstar fiasco. I mentioned all that above, not gonna bore people and type it again. But Fujitsu took the bull by the horns and did a better containment job than IBM. To this day i wont touch a deckstar! But i inagine the newer deckstars are fine.

 

[onrdbandit]

Howdy,

I have had about 4 drives in different machines over the past 5 or so years. 2 Seagates, 1 Maxtor, and 1 WD, and have not had trouble with any of them. Maybe I should go buy lottery tickets, but hard drives have not been a problem for me...

If we are only animals, how do we decide what is right and what is wrong?

 

[trabant]

Hello, I've just experienced a failure of a 6 months old Maxtor 160GB SATA, I think the general reason of the failures is the increasing size of the drives, that's why I'm thinking to replace it with 2x80GB SATA RAID 0, would you suggest again Maxtor or switch to Seagate? I'm using also 2xWD Raptor 36GB SATA as main drive and no problem so far.

 

[zbnet]

Seagate or Samsung Spinpoint seem to be the consensus of the discussion - I'm staying away from Maxtor at the moment.

 

[Synergyman]

After no warning at all...
Maxtor 40 gig just crashed a few days ago.
Had a Seagate Barricuda that had crashed before it.
The Seagate crashed within a year.
The Maxtor crashed within two years.
I'm beginning to think it is a problem with another part of my computer. There must be other factors that cause a HD to fail. Or maybe I have just been unlucky.
I guess all brands of hard drives are reliable up to a certain point. My problem is when my hard drives have died, it had been some time since I had done a backup because I get complacent and believing in the reliablity of the hard drive. Especially when the drives I used on my old Pentium I and IIs are still good today. (10 years)
From now on I think my attitude should be that any hard drive can go at any time and not trust any one brand.
No matter how much hassle it may be, backup daily.
It would be nice to find a program that could conveniently do backups for you everyday automatically.
Even so, it is still a lot of trouble to reinstall the os and all your programs to get the computer back to the perfect setup you had initially.
My conclusion: don't trust any of them.

 

[dmusicant]

I replaced all the drives in my daily-use PC with Seagate Barracuda IDE's, 120, 160 and 200 GB last summer. It was like pulling teeth to get my rebates from Seagate (bought them from Fry's Outpost.com), but finally got the bucks. I think the last one was over 7 months from purchase (!), and around $50.

I got them more than anything because of their reputation for quietness. My main PC doubles as an HTPC. Eh, I do everything on this box. Also, they have a very liberal warranty these days - 5 years!! I have a couple of Maxtor HD's, actually every HD I've ever owned. Knock on wood, I haven't lost one yet, although the first Maxtor I got developed bad sectors rather early and I RMA'd it, chipping in an extra $100 to upgrade from a 2.0 to a 2.7 GB drive. I did dismantle my first HD a few months ago for fun and the magnets, a 220 MB.

 

[jurgen36]

: Synergyman
The way I do my backups is as follows;
I use to Sata Raid arrays as main drives in my machines. I work with one array and use the second as a backup. As a backup program I use Acronics True Image Server. On shutdown I fitt a floppy with the backup program. It loads it up and does an incremental backup of my main array, then the batchfile resets and changes the parameters for the next boot to the backed up system. This way I could only possible loose one days work in case of catastrophic drive failure. You can do the same with only two normal drives. In other words I always use a new drive system aftere rebboot. I hope this might help you.
Regards
Regards

Jurgen

 

[stduc]

I've had no trouble ever with hard drives until recently. I have used western digital and hitachi drives as well as fujitsu. All very reliable until..... January this year.

1 Hitatchi deskstar (Or should that be deathstar?) went bad in a Raid array and took the others with it! (One crashed and blew the NVRAM’s of the others – so much for RAID protection!)

I replaced the Hitachi's with western digitals - 1 of which only lasted 10 seconds before crashing quite spectacularly! – replaced foc of course – but delayed me by a week or two)

The Seagate drive on my Dad’s PC is in its death throws.

So I’m wondering who makes the best drives these days as well.