Most Realiable Hard Drives

[Sara Yamamoto]

Can anyone tell me which hard drive maker is realiable?

 

[twocows]

Western Digital and Samsung. Stay away from Seagate.

 

[Gerri Shin]

I very much agree with Twocows. Western Digital is by far the most reliable drive brand I've used. (never used samsung, so I can't judge them) I've had 2 seagate drives fail on me in the past 2 years, they were both purchased at the same time.

Verdict: Western Digital

 

[Sara Yamamoto]

What about Maxtor? I have it on our computer and it hasn't failed yet.

 

[donavannj]

Well, those old hard drives were meant to last no matter the manufacturer. Those two are talking about if you were to buy right now, though I personally haven't experienced any problems with Seagate.

 

[Gerri Shin]

Maxtor has, since you got that drive, been bought and is now operated by Seagate. Any new Maxtor drive is basically a coin flip whether it will work/last at all. I highly suggest staying far away from newer Maxtor Drives.

 

[ltsang]

I say western digital. I'm using that now. I also have a portable hard drive too.

 

[Archer]

Are we talking external drives or internal? Because the external WD drives are just horrible.

Internal: Western Digital, Samsung, Seagate
External: Samsung, Seagate.

Seagate's old 7200.11 generation had a few issues, which is why people have a grudge, but the current 7200.12 generation is fine.

Have a look to see what the closest RMA centre is or look at price. You will pay a little more for WD. No amount of wise-purchasing can beat having backups.

 

[Captain Fabio]

I have always used WD, from selecting them for internal or external.
Never let me down once.​

​

 

[Archer]

I have always used WD, from selecting them for internal or external.
Never let me down once.​

Their externals are hit and miss. The WD Elements are fine, but the Passports are rubbish.

Samsung make the nicest casing.

 

[Captain Fabio]

Their externals are hit and miss. The WD Elements are fine, but the Passports are rubbish.

Samsung make the nicest casing.

Oh yah, forgot about that. I only have the Elements, so it is all good!​

​

 

[Archer]

Oh yah, forgot about that. I only have the Elements, so it is all good!​

Yeah, the Elements are just what they say they are, basic. Which is a good thing, as you don't pay extra for the software and "sleek" casing, that is only less sturdy. Plus, they use proprietary plugs on the USB cable, so if the cable breaks. Warranty. If the enclosure breaks, you can't just rip the drive out to pull the data off like you otherwise could, as they use a custom connection to the HDD's PCB, so there's no SATA.

 

[Mr. X]

WD.

I don't see why everyone is hating on seagate. I've used a few Seagates and they have lasted 5 years each. They would proably last another year, but im replacing my computer every five years as well.

Maxtor however just sucks. I've had nothing but problems with those, even the older drives.

 

[Sara Yamamoto]

Are we talking external drives or internal? Because the external WD drives are just horrible.

Internal: Western Digital, Samsung, Seagate
External: Samsung, Seagate.

Seagate's old 7200.11 generation had a few issues, which is why people have a grudge, but the current 7200.12 generation is fine.

Have a look to see what the closest RMA centre is or look at price. You will pay a little more for WD. No amount of wise-purchasing can beat having backups.

I have one the older internal hard drives by Maxtor.

 

[Shining Arcanine]

Can anyone tell me which hard drive maker is realiable?

I used to buy only Western Digital hard drives, but their quality went south about a year or two ago. I know at least one major company was buying only Western Digital hard drives and they had them start dying one after another within the past year.

The reviews on the Samsung are by far the best at Newegg, so you probably want a Samsung hard drive.

If you want higher reliability, then I suggest going with a SSD by Intel. Those are the best as far as reliability goes.

WD.

I don't see why everyone is hating on seagate. I've used a few Seagates and they have lasted 5 years each. They would proably last another year, but im replacing my computer every five years as well.

Maxtor however just sucks. I've had nothing but problems with those, even the older drives.

It is funny that you say that you have had issues with Maxtor and none with Seagate. Seagate purchased Maxtor several years ago, so now all of the Maxtor branded hard drives are Seagate hard drives with Maxtor's name on them.

Anyway, Seagate hard drives have a bad reputation for reliability with almost everyone I meet. In December, I thought I would give them a try despite the warnings and brought one. It died after a little over 6 weeks of operation. I will never buy another Seagate hard drive.

 

[Archer]

Anyway, Seagate hard drives have a bad reputation for reliability with almost everyone I meet. In December, I thought I would give them a try despite the warnings and brought one. It died after a little over 6 weeks of operation. I will never buy another Seagate hard drive.

Anecdotal. I see WDs fail over Seagates at a 3:1 ratio. The last generation was bad, but the current one is fine.

 

[Shining Arcanine]

Anecdotal. I see WDs fail over Seagates at a 3:1 ratio. The last generation was bad, but the current one is fine.

You might want to say what "Anecdotal" means. Simply saying "anecdotal" is ambiguous because the semantics of a single word sentence are undefined.

Also, your statement "The last generation was bad, but the current one is fine." is ambiguous. You might want to say it is you mean by "last generation" and "current one". It is not clear whether you are referring to Western Digital or Seagate.

Lastly, while your statement "I see WDs fail over Seagates at a 3:1 ratio." is meaningful, it makes no sense in the context of the quote of my post. It might have made sense in agreement with my statement that "I used to buy only Western Digital hard drives, but their quality went south about a year or two ago.", but you failed to quote that.

With those issues in mind, I do not understand what you mean. Would you please be more clear?

 

[twocows]

You might want to say what "Anecdotal" means. Simply saying "anecdotal" is ambiguous because the semantics of a single word sentence are undefined.

Also, your statement "The last generation was bad, but the current one is fine." is ambiguous. You might want to say it is you mean by "last generation" and "current one". It is not clear whether you are referring to Western Digital or Seagate.

Lastly, while your statement "I see WDs fail over Seagates at a 3:1 ratio." is meaningful, it makes no sense in the context of the quote of my post. It might have made sense in agreement with my statement that "I used to buy only Western Digital hard drives, but their quality went south about a year or two ago.", but you failed to quote that.

With those issues in mind, I do not understand what you mean. Would you please be more clear?

Let's not get into an argument over semantics, his meaning was pretty obvious. He meant that your one case of failure isn't indicative of the brand as a whole. Based on the context of his earlier statements, he meant that older Seagate drives may have seen some problems but the newer ones are fine, or at the very least better than Western Digital drives.

Let's leave it at that. This thread's about hard drives, not about language.

I disagree with you both. I find WD drives to be very good. Their internal drives are certainly superior to their external ones, though. I have a Seagate external drive that's survived nearly falling apart on me, so I can't complain about that, but I generally recommend against the brand in general due to the high failure rate I've seen personally among people coming to me with problems.

 

[Archer]

Seagate's old 7200.11 generation had a few issues, which is why people have a grudge, but the current 7200.12 generation is fine.

This is what I was referring two. Considering I'd already said it, I didn't want to be repeating myself.

He meant that your one case of failure isn't indicative of the brand as a whole. Based on the context of his earlier statements, he meant that older Seagate drives may have seen some problems but the newer ones are fine, or at the very least better than Western Digital drives.

Thank you. Yes, that was what I meant.

I disagree with you both. I find WD drives to be very good. Their internal drives are certainly superior to their external ones, though. I have a Seagate external drive that's survived nearly falling apart on me, so I can't complain about that, but I generally recommend against the brand in general due to the high failure rate I've seen personally among people coming to me with problems.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with either. WD's failures are more often than not the 3.5" Caviar Greens, which are poor quality, and the 2.5" Blues, which don't seem to cope well with life in a moving laptop.

As previously mentioned, I'd happily recommend their internal HDDs and even the Elements externals, just not the Passports. It's very similar to HP, where one line's bad quality has damaged another's reputation undeservingly.

I don't see why we need to complicate things, I'm sorry if my post was unclear.

 

[Shining Arcanine]

Let's not get into an argument over semantics, his meaning was pretty obvious. He meant that your one case of failure isn't indicative of the brand as a whole. Based on the context of his earlier statements, he meant that older Seagate drives may have seen some problems but the newer ones are fine, or at the very least better than Western Digital drives.

Let's leave it at that. This thread's about hard drives, not about language.

I disagree with you both. I find WD drives to be very good. Their internal drives are certainly superior to their external ones, though. I have a Seagate external drive that's survived nearly falling apart on me, so I can't complain about that, but I generally recommend against the brand in general due to the high failure rate I've seen personally among people coming to me with problems.

Thanks for clarifying that, although I never said my experience was. I simply said that the first Seagate drive I brought failed on me and I don't plan to ever buy another one again.

As for Western Digital hard drives, they used to be good until about a year or two ago. Then they went south. At least part of the problem has to do with a new feature that Western Digital introduced that does automatic head parking when the drive is idle to save power. The problem with that is that if you are browsing the internet, the head will park. Then when you click a hyperlink, the head will unpark. Then a few seconds later the head will park again. It is fairly simple to get a few thousand head parks in a single day via typical web browsing. These drives are only rated for 300,000 head parks, so this feature will kill your drive very quickly.

You used to be able to observe the excessive head parks via SMART, but a while back Western Digital modified their firmware to "fix the problem". They modified it so that the automated head parks are no longer reported by SMART and claim that the hard drives won't fail because of them. So far, they have not explained why their automated head parks are less likely to make their drives fail than normal head parks and as far as I can tell, there is no difference. The mechanical parts will wear out from head parks whether the head parks are done automatically or traditionally.

The automatic head parking feature was introduced on the green series and it also is used on their mobile drives. I think it might have gotten into their higher end models, but I am not certain about it. Anyway, Western Digital's quality has gone south at least in part because of this. I am not sure if they made any other "improvements" that also cause failures, but since they did something so stupid, I would not be surprised if they did. I used to be able to blindly recommend Western Digital to anyone who wanted a hard drive, but I cannot do that anymore.

My uncle is on the IT staff for a large company and they deal with thousands of hard drives. They were buying Western Digital drives because they used to be good, but then in the last year, the Western Digital drives they purchased started failing en masse. As far as I know, the majority of them have failed and they have since switched to Hitachi. Most of the systems that they support are laptops, so the majority of these drives were 2.5" drives. I suspect that the failures had to do with the automated head parking feature that they introduced about a year or two ago.