Question

Well, I've heard bad things about several HDD manufacturers and experienced bad things with Maxtor and Western Digital.

Which HDD manufacturer should I be buying from if I want an affordable, reliable SATA drive?

Answer 1

Of the many Seagate drives I've handled over the years, I've only every had one go bad, and another may be on the way out (certain SMART readings have started to clime, a new drive will replace it in the RAID array very shortly). I've had much worse luck with other manufacturers, but as I've used far less of their drives the relevance of any statistic I quote could be hotly debated! This unfortunately is something you find in most anecdotal information - someone who has had two Maxtor drives die and bought no more has a 100% failure rate for that manufacturer but the two drives that died around the same time from the 20 they bought that year is only a 10% failure rate.

There were a few problems with 1Tb and 1.5Tb Seagate models some months ago, though these may have been cleared up by now. Make sure you check the firmware version of any 1 or 1.5Tb drive you buy and update as needed.

Most of the really bad stories I could recount (Maxtor had a bad patch some years ago, which is why many people won't touch them, and there was the big Deskstar/Deathstar problem not long after that, and so on) are too old now for them to have much relevance to the purchasing of new drives. For more up-to-date information you'll need to look through the last few months techie news, though be prepared to have a job filtering good information from the FUD and bad testing/benchmarking procedures that are out there!

A very important distinguishing factor between manufacturers and drive ranges is warranty support - how long a warranty do you get, what are the other official terms (will they always send out a new like-for-like-or-better drive, or could they send you a refurb?), and how good/quick are they at dealing with faults and returns. Also make sure you know who the warranty is with - with OEM drives most manufactures will expect you to send a faulty drive back to where you got it from, not directly back to them, which can delay/complicate things. Apparently Seagate are good for honouring direct returns for OEM models, though I only have anecdotal evidence for this. If in doubt, get retail boxed drives (though these often cost more).

I've stopped trusting meaningful data to single drives, even if that data is properly backed up (i.e. regularly backed up and the backups tested regularly enough too). For my main data stores I use pairs in a RAID1 arrangement. As drives are so cheap these days and both Linux and Windows support software RAID out of the box (0, 1, 5, 6, 10, & others under Linux, 0 & 1 under Windows non-server and 0, 1 & 5 under Windows server editions) I feel the extra outlay and setup time to be worth it, though if you are buying a drive for a games (or home entertainment in general) machine it might be more hassle than it is worth to you.

On servers that need minimum downtime everything is on RAID1 (or 10, or 5, depending on the performance metrics desired) though on my home and dev machines the OS and apps are on single drives (these can be reinstalled easily if the drive goes bad) with actual work (code, data, VMS, ...) on RAIDed drives. I use RAID0 for speed in some cases too (my games on my main home machine are on a RAID0 or two drives).

When buying a pair of drives for RAID1 (or a larger set for RAID5/6/10) I suggest that you either buy from different manufacturers, buy from difference ranges from the same manufacturer, or if you do get the same make+model for all the drives buy them from different distributors. This lowers the risk of all the drives coming from the same bad batch and thereby reducing the risk of them all failing within a short space of time (i.e. the rest of the array failing before you've had chance to replace the dead drive).

Avoid cheap hardware RAID (like that offered by most new motherboards' SATA controllers) though. This is really fake hardware RAID and is a mix of the worst points of hardware and software solutions.

Answer 2

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sysadmin-recovery/

All hardware sucks. People have strings of bad luck with drives, and good luck, at one point, I noticed that all my old drives that still worked were Seagate. Modern Seagate laptop drives seem to be overly optimized for simple large file reads and writes, vs random thrashing, so my next drive with be a WD Scorpio Black (don't know what I will do with 320GB, so not getting a 500GB is not a big deal).

Expect them to die. Back up. Buy two. Don't use RAID, copy from one to the other (rsync is always a great option), this way you are not dependant on your RAID controller working or being replaceable.

Update, got the drive, it sure is a nice fast laptop drive, and HUGE.

Answer 3

I tend to buy drives that have the longest warranty period. I have used Western Digital exlusively for years now with no problems(had bad experience with Maxtor). I think it's just a matter of bad luck/environment. My first computer I didn't keep clean(dust obstructing airflow), and it got hot in my room often, so it is probably more my fault than the drive's.

No matter what, I always do backups of my most important data. RAID won't protect you from viruses/accidents. I have a second old computer with an extra drive in it, to which I copy my backups to. This is still not fullproof, but for me it is a good balance of convenience, cost, and protection. Google also uses hard drive to hard drive backups quite a bit from what I understand. Except they backup to harddrives in completely different geographical locations, which, for one thing, protects the data from even natural disasters.

Answer 4

I've had a number of failed Western Digital drives over the years, I've also found the drives to be noisy. I'm never buying another WD drive.

Personally now days I always purchase Samsung (SpinPoint) drives.

I've got quite a few of these, some get some seriously heavy use, some just run 24x7 and some get used in the normal on and off cycle as required and (touch wood) I've never had a problem.

They are also nice and quiet (for a spinning HDD!) so ideal for a home server setup.

Answer 5

After years of working with drives, I've given up trusting one brand over another.

I've dropped a WD out of a moving 4WD and not lost any data, and bumped a Seagate standing on it's edge and lost everything.

Currently I've mostly got Seagates internally, and WDs externally (just the way it happened). Don't trust any of them, if it's important, back it up, twice, and twice again just to be sure. Keep it offsite, and online if you can.

Then buy what suits your needs most, cheap to run (green drives) cheap storage, or super-fast.

Answer 6

See this post about my thoughts on hard disk drives... Lately, it's not about the brand, but the model of the brand these days...

-JFV

Answer 7

Personally, I have had very good luck with Raptors, but they are spendy. I have also had very good luck with the Barracudas. Generally, I do a striped array (RAID 0) of Raptor drives for my OS partition and a mirrored array (RAID 1) of the slower, bigger drives for my data partition storage.

Answer 8

• Check pricegrabber to see which drives everyone is praising or trashing.
• Check the reliability database at storagereview.com (registration is free). If nothing else, it can show you which drives to be cautious about.
• Find something with a 5 year warranty. Keep the paperwork.
• Make backups. Every brand/model will fail eventually.

In short, nobody knows for certain which is the most reliable.

Answer 9

A lot of the bad rep associated with Deskstars/Deathstars is due to a little realised fact that at the time, they were transitioning into new technology, where they replaced metal disks with glass.

There's some great photos documenting the failure of this here

That aside, I am a big fan of Hitachi drives these days, they're fast, affordable and reliable.

I myself have decided to stay away from Samsungs however, I had bad experience with those, but It might not be all their fault. I had my parents machine eat 3 of them in succession, but then again, that machine also ate a WD so bad the drive stopped spinning up under power.

The moral I learnt from that story is if a machine eats hard drives for breakfast every 3 months, replace the power supply unit. #1 point of failure.

( Also, if you have an aluminium smelter contending with the power of your town and you have power-surges on a regular basis when it goes on/offline, enough to make the lights dim, you probably want something better than generic between that and your hard-drives )

Answer 10

I'd recommend WD, either Caviar Green or Black series. I have a Scorpio black in my laptop, and Caviar Green and black in multiple desktops. (Black for system disks, Green for media disks.) I'm currently running 11 WD disks between my everyday use computers and haven't had a failure in probably five years.

That's not to say that they won't fail, just my personal experience. Some people swear by Seagate, and they make good drives too, but when I buy a new disk it's always WD. They haven't let me down.