I used to always get Samsung SpinPoint drives but since the floods to HDD manufacturing happened, it seems Samsung have stopped making hard drives. I'm not sure what drives to get now. anyone recommend/ give advice? I'm looking to run my VIA 1ghz integrated processor / 1gb (max) memory box with FreeNAS so that I can access shared files between my tower and laptop on my network. (both running Windows 7) It was a custom modding project (probably lurking on here somewhere) that never got done, so running it with FreeNAS seems like a good idea. Most modern smartphones are now more powerfull than this box will be, even my tablet(s) are.
If you're going to store anything important, use some form of redundancy, like 2 drives in a mirror or 3+ drives in RAID-Z. All manufacturers have had their horror series/batches.
Right, there is really only 2 hard drive oem now, Western Digital and Seagate. I agree with Chicken76, get a drive from each and they are really unlikely to fail at once.
If you do go with the same manufacturer. Get drives from two different sources so you have different batches.
That is what I have heard also. I wanted to purchase a spinpoint, but apparently the new Seagates are just spinpoints. I've had mine for a year with no failures. I trust WD and Seagate.
If you're going to be running the drives in a NAS I'd go for a couple of WD Red drives as they are specifically made for the task.
Until Toshiba starts producing 3.5" hard drives in big numbers, those two are all you got . WD/Hitachi and Seagate/Samsung.
This is a very important point. I personally like WD, used the RMA service and had a good experience.
Oh yeah, I forgot WD couldn't buy Toshiba but was only allowed to purchase some manufacturing assets instead of the whole drive division since they had just acquired Hitachi.
No, WD wanted to buy Toshiba drive division, but weren't allowed to since they had already just bough Hitachi. But they did buy some of Toshiba hard drive factory, just couldn't get all of it. Must have been one of those so called anti-monopoly rules that blocked the sale.
Actually they didn't buy anything from Toshiba, they had to sell part of the Hitachi 3.5" hard drive business to Toshiba. You are refering to : http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoug...reement-to-swap-hdd-equipment-and-facilities/ Which is a result of the regulatory decisions about the WD/Hitachi merger. The transfer of the damaged factory from Toshiba to WD is only a small compensation.
Personally I wouldnt say any brand, currently I have a mixture of wd and seagates in my setup. As said previously a good backup stratergy (raid is not backup) eliminates the need to try and find the "best" drive.
