Best/Most Reliable HDD Manufacturer?

What is, in your opinion, the best HDD manufacturer?


  • Total voters
    46

James

Well-known member
I'm looking for a new internal HDD, preferably one that I can rely on. I'm using WD at the minute but its not all that great so I'm considering Seagate.

Does anyone have any experiences with HDD manufacturers and could shed some light on what they feel is the best/most reliable one?
 
I've always had a bad time with IBM & Samsung hardrives packing up on me and tend to go for WD or Maxtor HDD. That said, I think it's probably down to the batch of hardrives you get that's in play here.
 
Samsung for value, speed, noise and reliability (I have an old 80GB Samsung IDE disk somewhere which still works after 8 years of use). Maxtor were also great back in the day (before Seagate took over).

I would recommend avoiding Seagate - the early 7200.11 1.5TB disks they shipped have a stupidly high failure rate and I own one which has been on the brink of death for months. Can't honestly recommend a company after something like that happening. Unlike most of the advice you will hear in this thread which is just opinion based on personal bad/good luck (like my Samsung recommendation), this is actual fact.

As for a specific drive, get the Samsung F3 1TB if you are looking for a fast, general purpose disk, or the Samsung F4 2TB for a slower storage/backup/archival disk. I own both and have no complaints.
 
I pretty much expected this thread to go the way it has already :D

My advice would be to avoid Samsung completely, personal experience of losing data means I would never buy any of their HDD products again.

Good luck getting a consensus ;)
 
I knew there'd be no direct result. As Shelley said, it all depends on the batch you get. It's not something you can judge off other peoples' experiences, unless there's a general disregard for product X.
 
I have had 2 WD 1tb Black HDD fail in the past year on 2 different PC's. The 3rd one is on its way out I think but I have a Seagate 1tb sitting here ready for transplant.

Really have no experience with anything other than Seagate and WD, but I think the WD 1TB's I have were a bad run because I heard great things about them beforehand.
 
The answer is...

None of them. Seriously, any of the major manufacturers produce some good quality devices and sometimes they produce crap. WD did it, Seagate did id, Maxtor did it - all of them did it.

I understand that if you have some really bad luck with a certain series of drives, you'll most likely avoid the manufacturer in the future. For me, this is Maxtor - some bad luck years ago when 3 identical drives died in a row, within less than a week. Which gave me the pleasure to install Windows and all my stuff 4 times in that time period. The first one died so fast that I didn't even have time to make a disc image for faster recovery :) After reinstalling on the replaced drive, I postponed making the recovery stuff, because i thought another HD failure soon should be highly unlikely. My fault. It died 2 days later. The next replacement died while I finished installing Windows. Highly pissed, I decided to drop Maxtor and get a Seagate. Problem solved though I do know that there are many satisfied Maxtor customers and I simply had some very bad luck.

shelley said:
I've always had a bad time with IBM & Samsung hardrives packing up on me and tend to go for WD or Maxtor HDD.
I still have two 8GB IBM deskstar drives, built in 1998 which both ran for many, many years. Last time I checked, they are still fine though I do no longer use it, because 8GB is not really exciting storage capacity today.

I do remember there was a major issue with one of the later IBM DeskStar series causing abnormally high failure rates which resulted in people referring to them as DeathStar :)
 
Where is the Seagate camp? Oh there it is.

*stands with the Seagate people*

No matter what brand you get I recommend always having a fan directly on the hard drive. Many people underestimate the importance of good cooling for mechanical drives.
 
The answer is...

None of them. Seriously, any of the major manufacturers produce some good quality devices and sometimes they produce crap. WD did it, Seagate did id, Maxtor did it - all of them did it.

I understand that if you have some really bad luck with a certain series of drives, you'll most likely avoid the manufacturer in the future. For me, this is Maxtor - some bad luck years ago when 3 identical drives died in a row, within less than a week. Which gave me the pleasure to install Windows and all my stuff 4 times in that time period. The first one died so fast that I didn't even have time to make a disc image for faster recovery :) After reinstalling on the replaced drive, I postponed making the recovery stuff, because i thought another HD failure soon should be highly unlikely. My fault. It died 2 days later. The next replacement died while I finished installing Windows. Highly pissed, I decided to drop Maxtor and get a Seagate. Problem solved though I do know that there are many satisfied Maxtor customers and I simply had some very bad luck.


I still have two 8GB IBM deskstar drives, built in 1998 which both ran for many, many years. Last time I checked, they are still fine though I do no longer use it, because 8GB is not really exciting storage capacity today.

I do remember there was a major issue with one of the later IBM DeskStar series causing abnormally high failure rates which resulted in people referring to them as DeathStar :)

Yup, That was the drives that packed up on me from IBM at the time although I was unaware at the time of these high failure rates. Like I said, It's down to the batch you get more often than not. And if your purchasing from the same retailer chances are if you have a dodgy HDD the chances are higher that batch they have purchased will be sold to customers.

That's the theory anyway. Too many factors to consider to point on a manufacturer when it could be the group of people building a bad batch down to the retailer selling a bad batch.
 
Yup, That was the drives that packed up on me from IBM at the time although I was unaware at the time of these high failure rates. Like I said, It's down to the batch you get more often than not. And if your purchasing from the same retailer chances are if you have a dodgy HDD the chances are higher that batch they have purchased will be sold to customers.

Ok, found the story on wikipedia

The IBM Deskstar 75GXP (as well as several other models made around the same time) became infamous for their reportedly high failure rates,[2] with more than 50% of the drives failing within the first year from purchase, sometimes in only weeks or days. Some users reported the drives being dead on arrival. This led to the drives being colloquially referred to as "Deathstars".[3] Due to this, the drives were ranked 18th in PC World's "Worst Tech Products of All Time" feature in 2006.[4][5]

Lawsuit

Despite failures being reported within the manufacturer warranty period of three years, Michael T. Granito, Jr., an American user of IBM's 75GXP hard drives, filed a class-action lawsuit against IBM on 16 October 2001 for defects in the product causing it to "crash", with both of the drives he'd bought having failed within a short time.[6] IBM was found to have misled its customers about the reliability of the drives. Without admitting responsibility, they settled this lawsuit in 2005, agreeing to pay $100 to every user whose Deskstar 75GXP drives had failed.[7]

Well, wow. An average failure rate of 50% is indeed impressive and I can understand a lot of people were pissed. I just barely remembered the DeathStar thing but didn't know it was that bad. No wonder it hit you when it actually hit half of all drives.
 
I've never had any issues with Western Digital. An external hard drive I bought from them back in 2005 still works great today.
 
All the current drives branded under Maxtor are Seagates really.


My personal choice of drives, in no particular order:

  • Seagate
  • Western Digital
  • Hitachi
  • Intel SSDs :)
 
I'd go between Seagate and Western Digital, but seriously, hard drives can always fail for no apparent reason, so it's pretty much a lucky guess when purchasing one, IMO.
 
I have:

150GB x 2 WD Velociraptors (still okay after 1 year)
300GB Maxtor (failed after 5 years)
160GB Samsung (failed after 2 years)
500GB Samsung (still okay after 3 years)
500GB Seagate (still okay after 2 years )
500GB Hitachi (still okay after 4 years)
2TB Hitachi (still okay after 1 year)
2TB x 2 WD (still okay after 1 month)

250GB WD USB2 (still okay after 5 years)
160GB Toshiba USB2 (still okay after 3 months)
500GB Hitachi USB2 (still okay after 1 year)

Based on my own experience, I tend to choose Seagate, Hitachi or WD.
:)
 
Segate for mine :) used them for years without any problems, had my main HDD (Segate) die a few weeks back but that ran 24/7 for about 2 years non-stop, currently on a WD drive now but well ive had had experiences with WD in the past so looking to move back to a Segate HDD shortly.
 
I used Maxtor's for years, then when Seagate bought Maxtor in 2005, I figured there wasn't going to be a difference and I did like Seagate's warranty so I've gone with them.

But if you've bought a Maxtor in the last 6 years, it was a Seagate brand. So those voting Maxtor should really be combined with Seagate.

Liz
 
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