Best Hard Drive Brand

[luispic]

Hey everyone!

I've been asked quite a bit lately about what's the best external hard drive to buy, and usually I say Western Digital, I personally think that if it's not the best, it's one of the best ones, but now the designs are so diverse and you have so much to choose from that I thought I'd post a poll, to know what everybody thinks and what have been their experiences with certain brand/model/design.

I'm looking for portable, reliable brand and if possible nice design.

thanks! and have fun!!

 

[NickCat11]

I don't think you are going to get a solid answer here as the ones you have mentioned are all top contenders. I usually stick with Seagate or WD.

 

[wepo]

I'd use a hard drive from any of those manufacturers. The problem is anyone who has made them for any period of time has a bad run. WD has had their lemons. Seagate used to be my first choice until the huge problems they've had in the last year or so and their slow reaction to address it.

That tipped the scales to WD for me. Can't go wrong with any sized cavier black imo.

 

[frostbyte5014]

Seagate has been my choice for the last three years.

 

[greggh]

Seagate has been my choice for the last three years.

Seagate by far. Nothing else is actually usable. Period.

 

[Kenhelms]

I only sell Hitachi. Mostly the ultrastars. Usually more expensive then the competitors, but Ive found these to last the longest(most are rated close to a million hours). They also have some real nice self encrypting drives in the travelstar line.

I think hard drive brand preference is like the Ford vs. Chevy arguements.

I believe it also pertains to the client base your selling to, selling a ultrastar a7 to a residential might not make that much sense.

 

[SOHO-NZ]

Nowdays I only sell WD Black, except for some applications, where I may use WD Raid Edition.

 

[frostbyte5014]

I hope you have good luck with the Hitachi brand. We wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole after IBM sold the product line to Hitachi. IBM made a big mess of it the last two or three years before they quit shipping. We used to call them Deathstars. Was the best drive on the market till IBM started selling refurbed drives and damaged drives as new. None of the drives would last over 2 years. We caught a lot of flack from our customers over those things. Maybe they are OK now but, I'm too gun shy to try them. I still think Hitachi should have changed the names of the product line.

 

[Kenhelms]

We use Hitachi because most of the major vendors we work with recommend/require certain ones, vendors like: Plant/CML, zetron, pyramid communications, raven electronics, EADs, EMnet, panasonic. Companies that make programs that can affect peoples lives. Not saying Hitachi is better, just sayin they must have got the bugs worked out to be recommended by that level of companies.

Some of my clients have 5-6 year old toughbooks(which they beat the heck out of) that are running on the same hitachi travelstar that came from the factory.

 

[frostbyte5014]

Hitachi has been in those markets for years. Long before they acquired their hard drive product line. Like you said though they must have ironed things out. I know it was rocky for them the first few years though.

 

[rusty.nells]

Here's an interesting article based on the Google study a few years ago.

http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-experience

...the team admits they have the goods on who makes good drives and who doesn’t...

Unfortunately, Google did not expose the name of the brands.

Vendors typically report “no trouble found” with 20-30% of all returned drives...

SMART can warn you about some problems, but miss others, so you can’t rely on it.

... infant mortality is much higher among high utilization drives.

 

[greggh]

I do a LOT of data recovery. Everyone of the field techs I deal with bring me the data recovery jobs. As of last week I was averaging 11 data recovery jobs from bad hard drives a week.

On average I get one seagate every 3 weeks thats actually bad. I get a TON of bad WD and hitachi. Way more than anything else.

 

[wepo]

greggh,

You should check out how cavier blacks compare to any seagate hd in customer rankings over at newegg.

It may be that the sources of your hd's that your doing recovery on have a smaller percent of seagates installed.. which is why you see fewer of them. I don't know. But to suggest there is a 3:1 failure disparency between seagate and something like a WD black is completely false.

I'm not knocking seagate, they were my favorite and still use them for SAS, but to suggest nothing else is even close is misleading.

I guess you didn't buy one of the millions of bad 7200.11 cudas that were shipped last year?

 

[Kenhelms]

You also have to take into account the amount of OEM installed WD and Hitachi, which is pretty high.

 

[greggh]

greggh,

You should check out how cavier blacks compare to any seagate hd in customer rankings over at newegg.

It may be that the sources of your hd's that your doing recovery on have a smaller percent of seagates installed.. which is why you see fewer of them. I don't know. But to suggest there is a 3:1 failure disparency between seagate and something like a WD black is completely false.

I'm not knocking seagate, they were my favorite and still use them for SAS, but to suggest nothing else is even close is misleading.

I guess you didn't buy one of the millions of bad 7200.11 cudas that were shipped last year?

I am not suggesting anything about a 3:1, nor am I talking about all brand new drives. This is all evidence from personal experience. We do 100+ calls a day. I have a lot of jobs/calls to base my statements off of. These drives range from (usually) 6 years old up to as new as last week. And in my many years of experience with many different drive brands, seagate has been by far the least likely to fail and WDs over the last 14 years have been way more likely to fail quickly or long before any reasonable lifetime. And when WDs have failed it is more times than not harder to get any data off of them when compared to even worse drives like samsung.

You also have to take into account the amount of OEM installed WD and Hitachi, which is pretty high.

Indeed, well taken into account. Those die a lot faster than any of the off the shelf retail versions of drives from the same manufacturers too. Dell will always go with whoever gives them the drives for the best price per hundred thousand ordered. They will not go with whoever gives them the best drive. Same thing goes for a lot of the other big oems.

 

[ClickRight]

I do a LOT of data recovery. Everyone of the field techs I deal with bring me the data recovery jobs. As of last week I was averaging 11 data recovery jobs from bad hard drives a week.

On average I get one seagate every 3 weeks thats actually bad. I get a TON of bad WD and hitachi. Way more than anything else.

Are you doing physical recoveries and opening the drives, or just logical? I've been experiencing a similar failure rate with WD and Hitachi, but Samsung is right up there as well.

 

[wepo]

greggh,

I'm glad you acknowledge kenhelms point (which was basically my as well) in that you have absolutely no base numbers (total installed vs failed) to draw your emphatic conclusion.

Your first post:

Seagate by far. Nothing else is actually usable. Period.

Is simply false.

And when you check respected sites like techreport, tomshardware, newegg and compare seagate vs wd black, you will see that they are close in terms of reliability, customer satisfaction and all other relevant qualities.

And I don't remember the last time WD had a hd line that came anywhere near 15% failure rate like certain models of the recent 7200.11 cuda. They've had lemons, but the 7200.11 was a disaster that should not have shipped the way it was. That is a quality control problem. Reuters

Also seagate recently cut it's warranty on consumer level drives from 5 to 3 years. Why do you think that is? Because they're better? No, because they are comparable to others and seagate was losing money with the warranty.

Before the last 2-3 years, I would agree seagate was #1 (but not to the extent you suggest). But they've let WD catch up and new hard drives are very comparable with WD taking the lead in some areas.

 

[hondablaster]

All I have to say is WD Black or bust. Cool to touch, fast, low price for quality. I also have this 10,000RPM Raptor in my PC for about 2 years now and it is still going strong. My PC is on 24/7 well more like 24/5

 

[NYJimbo]

Seagate drives are turning into a nightmare. For nearly a year now they have been having incredible amounts of failures on their THAILAND runs, especially the 7200.11 batches and also 7200.12

Go to the seagate forums and look at all the threads about this and see how the "moderators" keep purging messages when things get a little too close to people talking about class action law suits.

 

[1aComputerServices]

I have been only offering WD and Seagate to my customers for about 3 years. The one and only Hitachi that I bought for a customer was trash and had to be returned.