Who makes the best disk drives?

Boxers or briefs?

Talk to a dozen computer tech's across the USA and ask each one "What brand of drive do you have the most failures with?"
And, no two will give you the same story. Not Exactly the same story anyway.

I've personally found that environment affects different brands of drives differently.

I found the comments about Hitachi drives almost laughable. Deskstar? Really? Are you kidding me? Those used to be the IBM drives and across the tech community they were called "Deathstar" drives. I replaced many of those in my own Computer business. I'd NEVER buy one.

Ages ago, WD made a pretty good drive, but in later years, their quality and reliability has gone right down the toilet.
It's not a brand I want to have to rely on.

Overall, with a few model exceptions, Seagate is still the drive I buy and install for all my customers. It's what I run here, as my main drive. MY backup drive (1TB) is a Samsung, a company that has come a long way in the past few years.
I've not had to replace even ONE Seagate drive in the past decade, while most of the Seagate drives I've installed, replaced failed WD drives. Many of those were in External Drive Enclosures.

But in the final synopsis, it all comes down to personal preference. Eh?

I had a 30GB deathstar and it never failed on me. Still spins up to this day. Only drive I ever really avoided was the 7200.11 Seagate and Maxtors.

Looks like Seagate is the one to avoid. And the only drive I had ever fail was a Seagate. Funny coincidence. My best drive is a 2.5" Fujitsu external. This one is being hauled around a lot and never fails - knock on wood.

The only 2 dodgy drives I had were Seagate . An old Maxtor is still going fine. Noticeably slower than my WD , though.

My old 640GB Maxtor still plows along too. It is only a bit noisy. I use it only as 3d image storage option on the desktop. 1st is an internal disk and 2nd is an external USB3 attached SSHD. The latter ones are of course a lot faster. But who cares, I just minimize (hide) Macrium and go on working.

Stop telling me about this with Seagate lol. I just cloned my WD system/boot drive to a faster Seagate I was given, and now the Seagate is my system/boot drive.

ehhhh well at least it's the only one that can go down that won't screw me over. I can always setup Windows again, np. I have backups for my music, but not my videos.

Well holy crap, this totally validates my assumption that Seagate drives are shoddy. Almost EVERY SINGLE hard drive I've ever come across over the years that crapped out prematurely have almost all been Seagates. My last Seagate drive died, the Seagate before that one crapped out, and several 2.5" Seagates I've come across have crapped out. Even my current Seagate 1 TB drive had some disk errors literally in less than a year of use.

Yep, I'm staying away from Seagate.

Currently, I'm using two 3TB Toshiba hard drives that I bought from Newegg on a KILLER sale for under 200 dollars, which is amazing consider the price per gig ratio and the fact the two are internal hard drives. I'm hoping those last, Toshiba backs these particular drives with a three year warranty on top of my extended 1 year warranty.

Surprised to learn Hitachi scored so well.

I currently have 4 @TB Seagate Greens, internal, and 1 Seagate 4TB external usb 3.0
So far, no issues.

I'm also surprised to read about the Hitachi high scores and will keep that in mind for the future. I've had many more 'premature' failures with Seagate (not to mention more noise) than WD, so have gradually replaced the SG drives in my machine with WD Black. Have yet to jump the progress barrier to SSD but am considering it if and when finances and drive reliability allow.

In my family we still use :

IDE interface internal:
4x Maxtor drives (<= 300 GB)
3x 320 GB Seagate
2x 40 GB IBM Deskstar
8x WD 320GB

IDE interface external:
2x 80 GB IDE Toshiba 2.5"
1x 120 GB Maxtor
1x 200 GB WD
1x 250 GB WD

SATA internal:
4x 500 GB Samsung
4x 500GB WD
2x 1T Samsung
2x 1T WD
4x 1.5T Samsung
4x 2T WD

SATA external:
1x 1T WD
1x 1.5T Samsung
1x 2T Seagate
1x 3T WD

So far, in the last 15 years, we had 3 Maxtors, 2 Seagates and 2 WD's that died on us.
I bricked a 40 GB IBM Deskstar due to insufficient cooling, and killed a 500 GB Samsung using a faulty powersupply.

Old pC's don't get dunked, they are used as file servers.
(I am still using a Pentium 3, driving 9x harddisks!)

Xyberbat said:

Old pC's don't get dunked, they are used as file servers.

Click to expand...

Or headless firewalls.

Ever since the "Great Flood ", not only that prices jumped but quality went down fast, at least where consumer models are concerned. Don't think it's fair to compare drives used in large data arrays and ones sold thru stores or installed in brand name computers.
Had or changed/installed hundreds of HDDs since the first 10 MB drives and had most of them fail at some time or other, yet still can see really old ones ( 10 - 20GB) IDE drives work like new, even some much maligned early Maxtor drives that survive to this day. You'd have to look at drives used in poor countries and see how many of those old drives are still in use.
Lately, it seems like a lottery buying a HDD. Seen drives of same make and model work without a hitch and other fail for no apparent reason.
Just an example, last year i got 2 WD 750GB "Green" drives from a security camera recorder that were running about 2 years with only few restarts, one had 20% health left (According to SMART) but the other is perfect in every sense and is still in my computer without a hint of trouble.
I opened many dead HDDs (really powerful magnets in them) and noticed quite a difference in robustness between old and new ones and that could be an explanation why older ones tend to last much longer. That could be explained by new and higher capacity ones have to have much higher density while stuck in smaller packages and that necessitates much finer and smaller components and being mechanical it directly translates to lover durability.
Luckily, SSDs are here to stay for a while and hope that in few years coming their price per GB will be much lover and mechanical will go the way of dinosaurs, at least where PC use is concerned.
Right now, I could not profess preference to any make of HDD but by my latest experiences Hitachi seem to have an edge, just in my experience mind you.

I don't use spinners any more; only SSD's. Back when I did I always seemed to have the most problems with Maxtor, and occasionally WD drives.

I haven't had a single problem with an SSD and am now on my 3rd drive.

acr731 said:

I don't use spinners any more; only SSD's. Back when I did I always seemed to have the most problems with Maxtor, and occasionally WD drives.

I haven't had a single problem with an SSD and am now on my 3rd drive.

Click to expand...

I do the same. I have 7 SSDs by now and the oldest ones are from 2007. Only one 60GB Mushkin died one day. It was only 2 years old. But Mushkin replaced it within 2 hours. They are on top of my shopping list now.

Btw: Here is a good deal today.

Kingston SSDNow V300 Series SV300S37A/120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - Newegg.com

Hey, that's the one i have for about a year now, not a speed daemon but fair enough. No troubles with it as long as FW is 505 or 507, 506 had troubles Boy, that's cheep on Newegg I paid about 100 for mine.

TechnoMage said:

... I found the comments about Hitachi drives almost laughable. Deskstar? Really? Are you kidding me? Those used to be the IBM drives and across the tech community they were called "Deathstar" drives. I replaced many of those in my own Computer business. I'd NEVER buy one. ...

Click to expand...

It's amazing to me that rep earned long ago on a product line continues to be spouted even though the issue was resolved years ago. Not to mention that the DeskStar line of drives has been thru several ownership changes since then. I doubt the current DeskStar line bears much in common with the products that earned the DeathStar moniker. It also amazes me that the company didn't rename the line in order to distance it from the issue.

It's the same with the Seagate 7200.11 drives. All that was needed was a firmware update. I have 2 of the Seagate 7200.11 drives that I applied the firmware update to and they have been in use daily for about 5-6 years with no issues.

With disk drives (especially spinners) the question isn't IF it will fail but WHEN.

Just unpacked 2 new 2'5 today , only hitachi's here for years, they've behaved great (and very silent\no vibrations).