Any opinion on Hitachi hard drives?

[skuba]

Hi, I would like to upgrade the HD on my dell inspiron notebook. I see a lot of people selling Hitachi hard drives on ebay that are compatible.

Do you have any experience with Hitachi HD in general?

Thanks a lot

 

[ribbon13]

The only good Hitachi/IBM drives are the E7k series. Those are the fastest notebook drives.

7200rpm 8mb 40gb 2.5"
60gb

 

[mwmorph]

no hittachi/ibm(smae comp-any) low quality. just look at whatr they did with the deathstar drives(failed so fast...) and how many people have problems with their rio karma(20gb hitachi laptop drive[search rio karma on eopinions.com. so many people exprience hdd failures, some a week or two after buying it!])

 

[ribbon13]

I almost got flamed for reccomend a Seagate instead of a Hitachi
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=51&threadid=1520508&enterthread=y

 

[mwmorph]

? i dont know man i think the quality of hitachi speak for themselves. seagate:good
samsung: good
WD:>10 years and still running great
hitachi no good
maxtor: bargain sometimes.

 

[skuba]

Well, I don't get it. People here are bashing the Hitachi, but on Newegg that are ONLY 5 start reviews of the notebook HD.
Newegg reviews
Why is that?

Thanks

 

[boyRacer]

I would take either Hitachi or Seagate.

 

[skuba]

Some people are selling the E7k series on ebay, the 60gb one for like $180. They say there is 3 year warranty. Can I trust those guys?

Also, do you guys think that maybe my notebook is not ready to have such a fast drive. My computer already gets really hot with a 5400 rpm drive. The fan is on a lot. What do you think?

 

[Pariah]

Hitachi 5400 and 7200 rpm laptop drives are pretty much at the top of the heap. Seagate's new 5400.2 lines looks pretty interesting though, and with capacities up to 100GB's, if you need more than the 60GB the Hitachi 7200RPM offers, you may want to give it a look. I wouldn't put Fujitsu or Toshiba up there with Hitachi and I have never used any of the relatively new WD laptop drives.

Originally posted by: ribbon13
I almost got flamed for reccomend a Seagate instead of a Hitachi
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=51&threadid=1520508&enterthread=y

You got flamed for giving a retarded recommendation. The guy asked about laptop hard drives and you told him a 2.5" 80pin SCSI drive was the best around, even though it won't work in any laptop. Even if it was ATA, it's still too thick to fit into any laptop.

Some people are selling the E7k series on ebay, the 60gb one for like $180. They say there is 3 year warranty. Can I trust those guys?

Someone above linked to Newegg who is selling the drive for $147 w/ a 3 year warranty. I'd go with Newegg for $30 less and a pretty solid reputation vs someone on Ebay.

Heat shouldn't be an issue, the drive operates with roughly the same environmentals as 5400RPM drives.

 

[corkyg]

I have 8 Hitachi/IBM drives running. Never had a problem with them.

 

[dev0lution]

Don't judge a company by their 3.5" drives. What's good in one form factor isn't always in another...

 

[flexy]

noone obviosly reads storagereview.com

The hitachis (7k250 sataII) series are the best and fastest SATA drives AFTER the raptors !

You just go ahead and recommend Seagate or Maxtor...just shows me someone didnt do his homework researching hardware The new Hitachi SATA drives definitly rock !

Edit: n/m if you're talking about notebook HDs...i was talking about the desktop parts Dont know about their NB drives.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: skuba
Well, I don't get it. People here are bashing the Hitachi,
Why is that?

Thanks

The IBM drive problems happened a few years back.
People have an impression on their minds that all IBM/Hitachi drives, until the end of time, will be bad.

There's really no point in trying to sway them otherwise. :shocked:

I'll never buy any Ford car, because the Pinto's had faulty gas tanks.

 

[Jeff7]

My Hitachi experiences:
IBM drive, 120GXP, head crash. Sent back, got a Hitachi labeled 180GXP. 44 days later, click of death.


I also have 5 Hitachi drives in a RAID 5 array, or rather, HAD. After I had 2 IBM/Hitachi drives die like that, which were supposedly safe (not the defective 60GXP and 75GXP lines), I decided I wasn't going to risk it anymore. I took the Hitachi 5 drives off the array and ran a full surface scan on each, and then checked the SMART readout of some. Though Spinrite 6 reported no bad sectors, the SMART on two drives reported 7 and 40 reallocated sectors. So they're already starting to use up their bad sector reallocation pool, and they aren't even a year old. The remaining 3 haven't had their SMART output checked yet. I'm now running Seagate drives.

For the record though, I do have a 30GB IBM Travelstar in my laptop, and even though it's a slow-as-a-dead-turtle 4200rpm drive, it hasn't given me any problems.

 

[beatle]

Reliable or not, their RMA turnaround time is a pathetic 1 month period with no option for cross-shipment. This is why I won't buy a Hitachi drive. Otherwise I treat all drives as being expendable. ALL have the potential to crash!

 

[Pariah]

That's simply false. I RMA'd half a dozen drives to Hitachi at once using their online forms. I didn't try to cross-ship, since I was in no hurry, so I don't know if that was an option. Anyway, the day after they received the drives, they shipped out replacements using Airborne 2 day. Some of them actually arrived the next day which was a Saturday, the rest the following Monday. Which means it took 2 to 3 days from the day they received my drives until I had replacements in my hands, faster than either WD or Maxtor had been for me in the past. I've heard similar stories from people over at SR, and have never heard of anyone waiting a month for an RMA. Hitachi must really hate you.

 

[JBT]

My Hitachi 40GB 5400 RPM laptop drive is still going stong after a year and a half. So far so good. I am really looking at the 7200 RPM 60 GB. That thing would be sweet... I'd get that if I were you.

 

[chilled]

Originally posted by: JBT
My Hitachi 40GB 5400 RPM laptop drive is still going stong after a year and a half. So far so good. I am really looking at the 7200 RPM 60 GB. That thing would be sweet... I'd get that if I were you.

Ditto with my 20GB one. But I don't use it half as much...

Incidentally my 180GXP was making a scratching sound over xmas, but has cleared itself up again and is now working fine. It's like it caught a cold! This is with heavy use and I've had no performance loss, so fingers crossed it doesn't die before it's time.

 

[Accipiter22]

I have a hitachi, works fine so far through week 1......dont' go by the reviews on new egg...they filter out a lot of the negative reviews....a lot.

 

[Ardan]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: skuba
Well, I don't get it. People here are bashing the Hitachi,
Why is that?

Thanks

The IBM drive problems happened a few years back.
People have an impression on their minds that all IBM/Hitachi drives, until the end of time, will be bad.

There's really no point in trying to sway them otherwise. :shocked:

I'll never buy any Ford car, because the Pinto's had faulty gas tanks.

Excellent point, Blain. I would recommend to you, Skuba, the hitachi drives. I have two 80GB Deskstar 7K250 SATA drives in a RAID 0 array and one of them is about a year or so older than the other and I highly doubt either one will ever fail. I think some of you just have amazingly bad luck, because i've never had a bad component. The only thing that ever failed was a Maxtor DiamondMax 8 40GB HDD, and they came back and said they can repair it and that a component just simply wore out after 3+ years of use. That said, we've had Western Digital and Seagate drives last half a decade or so, and only stopped being used because of space needs, not because they failed.

Then again, I scrutinize any hardware purchase so much that most people think it is at an obsessive level. You'll get your money's worth with the hitachi's, because I know some family members that have hitachi HDs in laptops and they're pretty snappy, very solid drives.

 

[ribbon13]

Originally posted by: skuba
Some people are selling the E7k series on ebay, the 60gb one for like $180. They say there is 3 year warranty. Can I trust those guys?

Also, do you guys think that maybe my notebook is not ready to have such a fast drive. My computer already gets really hot with a 5400 rpm drive. The fan is on a lot. What do you think?

That's funny because the 60gb one brand new is only $144
http://www.computergiants.com/items/one_item.asp?part=69045&aff=2

 

[Cygni]

For 10+ YEARS IBM was the standard in HD quality. Then came the now imfamous "OMG DEATHSTAR ROFLLMAOMOMAMA" incident. Now, for the rest of time, Hitachi (who purchased IBM's storage devision) will be the "DEATHSTAROMGAZM" producer, even if they blow away the competition. So are there more failures with Hitachi's over its competitors? Its increadibly hard to tell with all of the static built up over its reputation. If a Hitachi dies, it immediatly gets posted somewhere with a "I knew it would happen!!!!!11111", while if a WD dies, its just taken as fate.

Hitachi's notebook drives seem to be some of the best in the business. I wouldnt hesitate to buy one if the price was right.

 

[ribbon13]

For the ruggedized version.
http://www.computergiants.com/items/one_item.asp?part=74389&cat=99&subsubcat=193
http://www.jazztechnology.biz/product/HI60G7200ENNB

 

[mwmorph]

wait, then why are so many failures of the hitachi 1.8inch hdds(20gb) in the rio karma? the reviews of the failures are all over the place.

 

[skuba]

I guess those on EBAY chargwe more just because it already comes with the adapter for the dell inspiron notebooks. So all we need to do is slide it in.