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

Seagate: no. 1 of 2 dead in my case. The other one (7200.10 400GB) had a nickname: Tractor. You can guess once why.
WD: 4 of ~30 i had so far.
Toshiba: we will see what will they do.

 

512gb SSD's aren't too bad in price now compared to last year.

I'm happy buying 120 or 240gb ssd though.

 

I dropbox all my important stuff. If you do it right you can get nearly 25GB of free storage...

 

/me wonders if HDD price is still artificially high to cut copyright infringement (I decline to call it piracy).
If you can't store it, maybe you won't download it.

 

No. If you get two quarters where production is bellow demand, then it takes time to fill all that demand. Plus it is the usual thing with price lowering - everyone has different level of acceptable price. For someone who needs to store data right now, even the 150€ price was not high, even if it was 71€ just 2-3 weeks ago. Then as prices slowly dropped, there were people who were buying the drives at 130, 120, 110, 100€. Why would the retailers lower the price, if demand and supply are balanced and people are willing to pay that price. When more drives will be on market, the prices will drop. If the demand will be lower, the prices will drop. But if they can sell everything they got at the price it is now, why would they try to lower the price ?

 

So can anyone recommend a 2tb drive under £100. I've just spent the past hour trying to find reviews and opinions. But I'm just going around and around. For every good review there's a bunch of people saying they fail.

After reading this thread I thought perhaps the Western Digital WD20EARX. But I've just read a review that says it's slower then the previous WD20EARS.

I only need it as a storage drive as I have a SSD for Windows and software. I may be doing a bit of video editing so I assume I need a fast drive (7200rpm?)

 

Personally I'd go for the WD. IMHO it's no big deal if its a bit slower since it's for storage.

 

Where ? The only difference between WD20EARS and WD20EARX right now is that first one has a SATA2 interface, the second one has SATA3 interface. And to be honest, i can't really spot the difference either, even with benchmarks.

By the way, which WD20EARS was the "quicker" in the review you found ? 4-platter or the newer 3-platter ?

 

Never had a Hitachi drive fail. Had ~5 of them.
Had 2 Samsung F3s. They both failed in the first year.

 

Here is the review's conclusion. They say that because both drives run at around 5400 RPM they never get beyond the speed of the SATA2 interface. It sounds like I should get whichever is cheapest.

 

I could also go for the 2TB Hitachi 0F12115 Deskstar 7K3000. But I've seen people complain about these too. I guess there isn't a perfect drive out there. They're all going to have failures to a certain extent.

At least WD and Hitachi both have two year warranties.

 

I can do you the HD tune benchmarks if you need it, but let me say - they are both pretty much the same, if we talk about the newer 3-platter WD20EARS versus the 3-platter WD20EARX. And that is because the only thing which changed is really the chip for the SATA interface.

 

I've got 2 Samsung F4s and 2 Hitachi drives.
Happy with both, the Hitachi drives are slightly noisier I think, more annoying whine when they start up.
But for my next drives at the moment I'm looking at Hitachi 3/4tbs

 

I've used drives from all manufacturers over the years.

My advice is to buy the biggest/fastest/best drive for the lowest price and always back up important files to a cloud service such as SkyDrive, Dropbox, etc or an external hard drive. You just can't guarantee that a drive will be reliable, regardless of brand or experience, because one day it will fail.

My most reliable drives are a pair of Quantum UltraSCSI 18GB 10,000rpm drives from 2001, made by Maxtor I believe, who then went to Seagate. Still going strong in a HP Workstation 11 years later.

 

Only drive I've ever had "fail" was a Samsung F1. I currently have a Samsung F3, a Hitachi, a Seagate, a WD and a Maxtor and they're all going strong.

Fail is in inverted commas because it showed a SMART error so I decommissioned it, it didn't explode or anything fun like that.

 

So i had to pick up another hard drive and they handed me a fresh F3 at the local PC store.

Let's play spot the difference! Old Samsung on the left.

 

WHAT IS THIS. WHY DO I SEE A BARRACUDA LOGO ON THERE?!

Ahem. I hate seagate so much sometimes. It's force of habit.

 

Product of China? Don't drop it!

 

They even skimped on the ink. Would it be naive to think that the savings went towards quality control?

 

Looking even closer at the markings; those are just rebranded Seagate Barracuda drives, that means the Samsung Spinpoint range is now just another name for "Absolute tripe."