In a previous thread I pretty much compiled my new build. Anyway, originally I was going to get a 1TB Samsung HD103SJ HDD, since they seem to be good bang for buck. However Scan is all out of stock of these, and since I'd rather order the whole build in a batch, I looked at other HDDs and saw this Seagate drive; http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1tb-...720012-sata-6gb-s-7200rpm-32mb-cache-85ms-ncq Now I am hesitant buying this, knowing about Seagate's notorious customer service, and repeatedly failing drives, so I thought to ask here before buying. Just a note: I understand WD has much better quality, but I am on a tight budget.
I have owned Samsung drives, seagate drives and WD drives. Every single seagate drive I have had has failed. Had one Samsung drive fail and no WD drive fail. That is just my experience and as a result, would never ever touch Seagate again. However, the next poster could have the opposite experience.
I've not read up much on the failure rates of diferent brand hdd's but the only one I have had fail so far is a 750gb Samsung F1, it started making noises so I sent it off for rma. They sent me a replacement under warranty which promptly failed two weeks later. I have 2 seagates that are still going strong 6 years later though.
If it's is all you can afford and you need 1TB then I guess the choice is made for you. As with all products there will be a chance of failure so you should back up any important files so a HDD failure will only be a financial and time issue. Remember you will always here from people with problems but rarely from those without and I would guess that failure rates would be below 10% or the company would have probably failed by now. So I guess what you need to ask yourself is: 1, Do I need 1TB or can I get a smaller drive from a different manufacturer with a better rep? 2, Can I wait a little while to save up the extra? 3, Do I think the risk to price ratio is worth it for this brand? 4, Can I get 1 smaller drive now and another later when I need it?
I know it's budget creep but for £17 extra you could get one of the most, if not the most, reliable HDD on the market. http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1tb-...r-black-sata-iii-6gb-s-7200rpm-64mb-cache-8ms Surely you can find £17 pounds in a few weeks, 1 less pint at the pub for a few visits, miss one trip to the cinema, pick the gold out of loved ones fillings while they sleep.
I've already given up quite a few pints at the pub for this build! I'll see if I can squeeze this in there though, thanks. EDIT: I couldn't help but notice this drive. What's it like? The rpm isn't listed though...http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1tb-...ata-iii-6gb-s-intellipower-64mb-cache-8ms-oem
Surely he could spend £10 more than that 1tb WD drive you linked and get a 2TB seagate drive? Double the memory for an extra tenner is great value, plus if it fails you just rma it. Always back up and you won't have to pay excessive amounts for what at the end of the day is storage.
Green drives are normally 5400-5900 rpm. I have had a fair few drives and the only failure I have had was a Samsung 2TB but it went down slowly so I had time to get everything off it, just. Currently got Samsung, Seagate and WD drives and I've not had problems with any.
My personal experience is that I've had no WD drives fail, one Hitachi drive fail, no Samsung drives fail and three seagate drives fail. As such I don't buy Seagate drives anymore, no matter the cost.
I've had 3 samsungs fail, 1 seagate, & 1 toshiba. I actually swore off more Samsung drives but there was a SATA2 2TB drive going for £71 that was just too good to miss.
Seeing this thread about Seagate has reminded me I apparently have relocated sectors on my drive which means it could fail or is in the way to failing. If it does I am not too bothered it is a scratch disk for video. But still its only a year old.....
It's too difficult to guess really. Certain products, certain batches, particular factories might be worse than others. Overall it greys out. Maybe we should create an ongoing thread with poll: where everytime someone has a drive die they +1, so we create our own statistic.
Every Seagate I've had has got reallocated sectors.. but none have actually failed on me yet. I've had reallocated sectors on brand new Seagate drives. Samsung drives. I've had 4 of them, and none of them have had any problems. WD: I've got 7 WD Green (EARS) drives. 4 of which have failed.
I've had WD fail (several), Samsung, Seagate, Hitachi, you name it. Across different PCs over several years. Sadly information like this, individual user experiences, aren't a lot of help. What we really need is some hard data from a long term study of hundreds of thousands of drives. I don't have one to hand though!
There is outside chance the very first SATA drive I used, a 40GB Maxtor I think (and it may have been IDE) failed, other than that I have never had SATA drive fail on me, I used mostly Samsungs and a few Seagates and Maxtors (Maxtor now defunct and rolled into Seagate). I think hard drive technology is so mature by now the chances of any failure on a new drive is so low across the board that you could consider it to be independent of manufacturer. On the other hand I am not particularly demanding on drives either, I never leave my computers on the whole time and I generally change system disks a lot, I am on SSD system disks and the hard drives are used for file storage. If you are caning a drive a lot then you give it cause to fail sooner too.
Had a few Seagate drives die over the years, and a few Maxtors, and don't get me started on Fujitsu drives - never any Samsung ones though. I've had two WD laptop HDDs fail too. I tend to lean towards Samsung every time I need a drive nowadays.
Ah the Maxtor days! I had one noisy Maxtor some 11 years ago didn't fail on me though. I had two 160gb WD drives and one of them failed on me. Samsung no problems so far and I have yet to buy a Seagate.