Seagate/Samsung/WD Hard drives

[Azaril000]

Hi all,

Recently in the market to buy a new hard drive as my 2x 80gb drives are running out of storage.

Im looking for a high storage space drive as my PC case can only seem to take 3 hard drives internally due to space. So probably looking into 1tb one.

I've recently had a Samsung (dont know the model) fail on me which I bought in September 08 and lost alot of music/videos, so I am somewhat weary of Samsung but am prepared to acknowledge it could of been a one off unlucky drive.

I am currently looking for primarily Reliability and Performance as I game alot on my pc and also store many gigs worth of music/videos (and do not want to loose it all again!).

Im looking at:

Samsung Spinpoint F1:

Here

Hitachi Deskstar 7k1000.B

Here

Western Digital Caviar Black

Here

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11

Here

So the choice is between Seagate, WD, Samsung and Hitachi. Im no hard drive expert so Im asking for those who have some knowledge or experience to share with me any opinions, advice.

Thanks!

 

[Slowlearner]

At work I have 40 odd pcs, and hard drive failure is the problem most commonly encountered, and looking at the pile of failed harddrives over the last seven years I see Seagate, WD, Maxtor and Hitachi drives. Havent used many Samsung drives - 2 and one them is now giving me trouble. As Seagate was the first company that went form the usual three years warranty to five - it created a false sense that they were somehow better, which turned out to be not true at all. Yes Seagate will replace defective hds but thats a small comfort for the loss of data, and aggaravation apart from having to wait for a replacemnt to arrive.

The bottom line no particular drive mfg is better or worse than the other - though I will admit that there is no way I am buying a Maxtor drive anytime soon. And Hitachi drives are re-branded IBM Deskstar drives, also known some years back as Deathstars. I now consider Seagate, WD and Samsung as no better or worse than the other.

When buying drives. retail packages offer better warranties than OEM at an additional cost. Check the warranties first.

 

[California Roll]

^ totally agree. If cost/gigabyte was equal among all manufacturers, I'd choose WD all the time, just out of personal preference. Then again, out of the 20 or so hard drives I've purchased over my lifetime, I've had only 2 fail, and they were both WD.

Whenever I need more storage I just buy whatever is on sale or is the cheapest per gig. I currently own WD, Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi and no problems with any of them (so far). Hard drives can/will go bad. Always backup important data.

 

[MagickMan]

Lately I've been going with Hitachi, due to their excellent thermal and sonic characteristics. Performance isn't the best, but the 7K1000.B is outstanding for a media server.

 

[zerogear]

I love my Samsung F1, I currently own 3x 1TB drives and 2x 750GB of the F1s.

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

I've acquired a liking for WD, but no real basis for it except I've had good luck with them, and the one time I had one die several years ago they cross shipped me a new one.

 

[RebateMonger]

At this time, I'd NOT recommend anything from Seagate. They've been having FAR too many problems with their 7200.11 drives, and the 7200.12 drives are too new to predict their reliability. I did buy an $85 1.5TB Seagate drive earlier this year, but only because I couldn't pass up a deal. it's only used for non-critical backups at this time.

I've been buying a lot of 1TB Hitachi's lately, because they've been the cheapest, have reasonable performance, and the reviews aren't too awful. I've only been using them since December, so it's too early to know for sure.

Although one of the five brand-new 1TB WD drives I bought last summer was DOA, I still consider WD a good candidate. While ALL hard drive brands have produced "klunkers" over the years, I still have far fewer WD drives in my pile of failed drives. I'm still using some 80 GB and 120 GB WD drives from several years ago. I'm accumulating a pretty good pile of failing comparably-aged Seagate drives.

 

[specialk90]

I have 8 7200.11 500GB drives that have been working perfectly and running 24/7 since they first came out about 16 months ago. I also have 4-7200.10 250GB and 2-320GB 7200.10s with Zero failures over the last 3 yrs. All 3 of my PCs run 24/7. I also have 4-150GB & 4-74GB WD Raptors in 2 of those 3 PCs and 1 of them just died a few weeks ago. It was only 1.5 yrs old. The main problem people have experienced with Seagates is bad firmware, not bad or dead drives. I, too, experienced bad firmware which caused 1 of my 7200.11s to show 8mb cache when there is 32mb. It was a simple fix of updating the firmware. I just checked my 3ware Raid controller's Alarm status and none of my Seagates have ever had bad sectors whereas 1 of my 150GB Raptors did(different from the currently dead one). I think one of the reasons why Seagate is getting blasted is because they are #1 in sales so there are more people/more chances of problems. I also bought a 7200.1 laptop drive for my sister and my mother and they have been going strong for 2 yrs. When my mother flew in for Xmas, she was shoved at the top of an escalator causing her to drop her laptop case. It rolled end over end all the way down, but the drive still worked just fine(I know this doesn't mean much but its a funny & lucky story). Also, the number 1 killer of HDDs is heat. My drives never exceed 38 C under heavy load thanks to efficient and copious amounts of airflow.

If I were in the market for several drives, I wouldn't hesitate to get the new Hitachis, WD or Seagates. I say several drives because I never rely on a single drive - I always use Raid 1, 10 & 5. Depending on whether I wanted higher MB/s (7200.12s for sure) or Random Access(WD or Hitachi).

For RELIABILITY, there is no choice other than getting 2 identical drives and run them in Raid 1 which mirrors data on the 2 drives so if one drive fails, your data is still on the other drive plus you have no downtime of reinstalling/restoring. Also, if you have an Intel motherboard with the ICH7R, 8R, 9R or 10R southbridge, you can create a 2nd Raid array using Raid 0. So you take your important data and put it on the Raid 1 and take your non-important data and put it on the Raid 0. If you don't care about your OS & Apps, then put that on the Raid 0 plus your games too for max performance and then put your important data in the Raid 1.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

I've been a Seagate fan for years, and have had minimal problems with them, but as mentioned, this is highly subjective and all drive manufacturers produce drives that fail. It's just the way it is.

I had a 7200.10 drive for the last few years running most of the day every day and never a problem. Recently upgraded to 2x 7200.12 500GB. I conveniently get to skip the 7200.11 generation. As specialk mentioned, their problems were firmware, not mechanical, but Seagate handled it badly, which has tarnished their reputation even in my mind, so I just won't buy them. If Seagate didn't have the 7200.12s out I would have bought Spinpoints. They were on sale at Newegg for a week or so, and I just about did buy them, but I delayed my overall purchase a couple weeks and they weren't on sale when I pulled the trigger, so I went with the 7200.12s. The idea of a single platter 500GB drive (2 platters for a 1TB! yummy!) is just something the ubergeek in me loves, though, so I'm very happy with my purchase.

I tried really hard to talk myself into buying WD this time around, but I just couldn't get over the price difference. I worked in a computer store many years ago, and WD was the premier brand back then, but we saw plenty of WD drives fail. As I said, that's just the way it is. The price premium isn't justified in my mind.

Go read the bit-tech review of the new 1TB 7200.12 (they compare quite a few drives) and any other recent reviews you can find, and then just buy whatever brand feels right to you. Give your money to the company you want to do just that little bit better during this hard economic time.

 

[JASTECH]

My Seagates have been running 24/7 also with no issues. My Maxtors and WD crashed and 2 Fuji were used as clones but once the clone (cold) was put into the system everything was scrambled, the whole drive of data 2 times! My Hitachi's I have never had issues with so for my it is the Seagate 15k.6 series and the Hitachi's hands down!

Thanks, JASTECH

 

[Evadman]

according to google's white paper on the subject, all drives failed at almost the same rate. There was one manufacturer that was way worse than the others, but they fail to mention it (probably by design). Iw ant to know that manufacturer, because everything else is fine except that one. Remember, Google has hundreds of thousands of drives, so they have a huge data sample, more than anyone else in history. Everyone will have issues with a drive manufacturer, because most people have probably only bought <5 in their entire life, and that sample is not statistically significant.

I should state that I have personally bought more than a hundred for my own use over the years, and they all seemed to fail at the same rate, except seagate. Seagate seemed to be much more reliable than maxtor, wd or ibm drives. But I know that is because even with 100 drives, I am still an infinitesimal sample size. If I were to match google, I should have 1 brand failing at 3x the rate of anyoen else, and I haven't seen that. In fact (knocks on wood) I haven't had one of my own drives fail in several years, besides a DOA intel SSD.

 

[specialk90]

I bet most of those people with drives that fail anytime after a few weeks of use have poor to know airflow for their drives. This is something the Google paper touches on and they showed how higher temps caused shorter and shorter lifespans the higher the drives temps were.

Dell is notorious for poor airflow over drives. I remember reading part of that google paper and working on a Dell at the time. I checked the temp of the Dell drive and it correlated to Google's findings where a certain temp of something like 50 C or higher caused drives to fail in just over 12months. Dell's standard warranty is 12months so they don't care if the drive lasts more than 12months. At least that what I came to understand.

 

[nobb]

Ill have the agree on the above post that Dell does not design their systems well when it comes to hard drive cooling. On my Inspiron 6400 laptop, the hard drive is placed right next to the graphics card. As a result, my hard drive idles at 50C+, and close to 60C under load.

As for deciding on which hard drive to pick, I would just go with the one with the longest warranty (Caviar Black I believe). Might also want to consider which manufacturer has the best warranty procedures (probably Western Digital, due to their free advanced RMA service).

 

[brxndxn]

For reliability, i like the 'enterprise series' drives..

Seagate Barracuda ES

WD RE series

Basically, if you want reliability, pay a little extra and buy the SATA drive that's advertised for the enterprise..

That means.. don't buy your drive at Best Buy.