Storage So much for buying only samsung f4's. Samsung now is the same as seagate..

I hate having multiple hard drives in my case. It affects cooling too much. I'm not keen on externals as I'm likely to drop them. Plus I'm skint. I could backup to the other half's laptop but that would likely be a fruitless venture due to it getting a fair few knocks and bangs.

I might consider cloud backup at some point when I have some spare monies.

Maxtor are owned by Seagate. Did the ones you have break before or after the buy out by Seagate?

 

Maxtor became seagate didn't they...

And yes Maxtor were awful.

I guess I would go with WD.

I don't know if samsungs are still safe because of the acquisition but perhaps they are.

I just don't like anything associated with seagate.

 

before - and now i just wont go near them.... damn seagate own nearly everyone !

btw didnt samsung buy out IBM and use the deathstar design under there own brand for a while?

 

there was a 2TB for £80, you could get 2x 2TB

 

They don't own Hitachi lol That was WD, but I think they had to sell Hitachi onto Toshiba to stop a monopoly or something similar.

I know Samsung and IBM joined their research teams and filed patents together at one point. Not sure if they ever bought IBM though.

 

Already got 4 2tbs, don't want to have a bazillion drives
If 4tbs don't come below £180 soon, I'll just get a 3tb, or maybe 2 and sell one/two of my 2tbs.
Would rather jump up to 4tb though, since more drives just means more power, more heat, and more chance of failure

 

hitachi bought them not samsung

was a merger in 2003 to form hitachi global storage technologies - which is now owned by WD

actually looked it up lol

edit:

hitachi GST had to sell off manufacturing capacity to toshiba under the deal - there are now only 3 companies making mechanical hard drives - seagate , wd and toshiba

 

I thought WD were forced to sell the 3.5" part of Hitachi GST to Toshiba? Or did that never go through?

 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/07/wd_hitachi_gst_ftc/

it was actually manufacturing capacity apparantly

 

Ahh gotcha My Google Fu was weak lol. I've still not seen any 3.5" Toshiba drives though.

 

because they are still made by WD till tosh can make them..... which means the flood is hitting WD even harder , because under the sale terms they will have to send XXX amount to toshiba FIRST before they can sell there own....

 

If I got this obsessed/attached to my files I would give up using computers like I do.

Family photos are the only thing that I truly care about, and for those I have a printer.

 

That is a good attitude.

 

I've sent you some sprouts.

 

It all goes in swings and roundabouts. for a few years one manufactorer will be better then another etc. Over the last 17 years I have had drives from all the various manufactorers fail at some point. I also have a Seagate 250MB hard drive that still works 16 years after I bought it. Doesnt mean that they are the best or the worst manufactorer.

By saying you will only stick with one brand does not mean you wont have a problem.

The only way to mitigate risk is to have a robust backup solution in place, that way it really doesnt matter what you have in your machine. You get a failure, replace it, restore your data and you are set again till the next failure.

 

Of course there are problems with all brands and each brand will have drives that lost a long time.

I can only go by the experiences I have had.

I've had seagate and maxtor fail within a few years. When I was asked to go and get a PC working that was full of WD and seagate hard disks raided (including 2 x WD raptors), it was a seagate drive that had failed and was crashing the pc.

And when I warned my friend not to buy, he ignored me and then his drive failed within 2 years. That's my experience of seagate and thus I will not buy them just as I avoided maxtor for the same reason.

Someone who has had seagate drives last longer than 2 years may prefer them over other brands. I will continue to avoid them based on what I've seen. It doesn't mean I believe all seagates will fail, nor does it mean I believe all samsungs are reliable but I chose samsung because a friend of mine had 2 of them in raid for many years. The 5 that I've got have been very reliable.

I don't have any WD but have built a few PC's for people with WD and not had issue.

Also had an external USB drive sent to me because it wasn't working. I could see as soon as I opened the housing that it had been dropped cos the usb circuit board had come loose. The WD drive inside was working perfectly still.

 

Must admit I avoid maxtors too.

Bought a fair few over the years (say 5 or 6 years ago) and I think only one is going strong today.

It was a 250 gig job that failed smart about 2 weeks past its 1st birthday (and warranty!).

Still works now, refuses to die but cant use it for anything important due to the error.

 

I had so many Seagates die on me back in the day, maybe their QC has improved recently but I just don't want to risk it to find out.

I only ever buy Samsung and WD these days. Now its just WD.

 

Damn. I guess it's down to WD then, unless we can find out what, if anything, is going to be sold under the Samsung brand in the future.

 

I only trust WD. The 1Tb drive in this machine has taken so much crap, and it's still functional. Inversely; I had a SeaGate Barracuda 7200.11 fail on me within four months of purchase. That went back for a refund pretty quickly. The Seagate external I bought failed within a Week, going from writable to not even found in under 24 hours once it started to fail. I might have just gotten crappy luck twice in a row, but I do not wish to try it again, just in case I'm stuck with another dead HDD.

I would love a couple of WD Caviar Blacks, but they're just so damn Expensive. 1TB SSDs are worse, though.