Storage Hard Drive brands - the good and the bad?

Finally getting a new HD to all my important documents so am wondering what brands to avoid and what to look for.

Am after low power as in my house I'm eco friendly so not after uber fast read speeds etc, it'll be used to store stuff and read off by 1 or 2 networked computers.

Am considering 2TB's so want to getting somethng reliable with good warranty cover etc

Thanks

 

I'd recommend Western Digital for the above. I've actually never had one of their drives fail in my whole long legged life.

 

no hard disk drive is reliable enough for your important data.

backup periodically and use RAID.


i use WD for my desktop without RAID for cos they are pretty reliable, 2 Samsung + 1 Seagate in my RAID5 because they were cheap, different batch. one of the Samsung was DOA though.

 

i wouldnt bother with seagate we have had about 5 fail and all replaced with western digital

 

Yeah, go with WD or get a spinpoint.

 

agreed

+1 on WD and Samsung, had a dozen in my PC over the last few years, never had a problem yet

 

I exclusively run Sammys - too early to say anything about reliability though.

 

Personally:

Western Digital, Hitachi or Seagate for the statistical chance of less issues.

Samsung you stand a slightly higher chance of having warranty problems as a lot of the drives available in the UK are not covered by a direct Samsung warranty.

Personally I run WD green drives in my NAS and historical PCs with one failure, Hitachi Drives in my PVR etc and a Seagate drive in my laptop.

They are all alike really and you pay your money and you take a chance, drive failure rates are so small that the odds of having a faulty drive are so slim theres not much between them.

Just get the drive that takes your fancy, the Samsung F3 1TB drive is the all round drive of choice at the moment, I would go for a WD20EARS 2TB Green drive if I just wanted storage or if I was after an OS drive that wasnt a small capacity SSD then I would be going for the 500GB Seagate Momentus XT drive.

 

Thumbs up for WD, used them for years.

Thumbs down for Seagate - got a 1.5TB FreeAgent external drive that clicks away to itself constantly, and I know many other people who have had bad drives.

 

I'd go WD or Samsung given the choice but would take a free Seagate if given to me


Just remember to backup

 

ive got a WB black and 2x seagate barracudas in raid1. no problems with either. historically ive always used WD drives.

 

I had about 20-30 WD drives in last 3-4 years, only one drive had problems, even that one was working for a while.

 

I have a Seagate and 5 Samsung's that have never failed, and had a WD NAS that broke but the drive was still fine. I strongly prefer Samsung for storage drives.

 

Personally for me, Samsung are OK on their own, but i prefer WD, especially if i am using RAID. Had several Samsung drives fail in RAID arrays.

 

Everyone has had their own experiences with different brands. Some people have had worse luck, some have had no problems, etc. IMO just get what's cheapest and fits your specs, don't blame the brand, blame the extremely fine and fragile technology behind HDDs for failures.

I don't stick to one brand, and have only had two failures over the years. One WD and one Seagate. I still trust these brands for my future purchases, it's just a matter of chance.

 

I have had a lot of WD failures, and recently had a Samsung 1.5tb arrive DOA. But then I have had a lot of WD and recently, quite a few Samsung drives.

As docodine says, everyone has different experiences, I have had great luck so far with seagate and maxtor drives, whereas other people see them as some sort of no go zone. The important thing is to have redundancy to protect against immediate failure and backup. Don't think of any one drive as being a safe storage medium for your files. I have my important data EVERYWHERE! I would at least try to have your really important stuff on 2 drives and then somewhere externally to the machine, either on another machine, online or on disc.

 

Online backup is a wonderful thing, you're paying someone whose only job is to make sure your data is looked after. No worries on your end, and you can access your data from anywhere!

 

Yeah, for me Seagate and Samsung are no-go zone. Samsung for the crazy startup noise... Seriously, every time i powered up that computer with 1.5TB Samsung F2, i was thinking the drive was dying. I'm sure it was their kind of "stagered startup", but hearing the drive to try starting for few seconds was crazy.

And i never touched anything Seagate since i bought a 400GB Seagate 7200.10. As you can remember, those were the drives with no AAM at all. And they were supernoisy. Hell, it was able to make Antec Solo vibrate through the trays with those silicone dampenings. So you can imagine how much was that drive vibrating.

For backups, i personaly use Crashplan and backup my whole home folder from my Windows desktop to my Linux fileserver.

 

Funny that. Got 1 samsung f1 and two f3's in my pc. Both are fine so far, touch wood.

 

Well starting with 1TB Samsung F1 off Azh_fx then going to look at a 2TB drive