Best HDD manufacture?

Mark M

Mark M

Mark M

Soldato
Joined
6 Jan 2006
Posts
3,423
Location
Newcastle upon Tyne
Obviously pretty subjective but what beands should I be looking at buying? I havent built any in a while but I always used to go with Maxtors for the price.

Aslo Ive never really understood the different speeds and caches of a drive? Is it as simple as the bigger the better?

Cheers, Mark
 
Samsung for silence.
WD raptors for speed.
Hitachi/IBM and western digital caviars for a good middle ground.
Maxtors are unreliable imo.

16mb vs 8mb cache - yeah the higher the better (faster).
 
Price and length of warranty is what seal the deal for me. So I usually buy seagates as they have 5 years warranty, never had much problems with hard drive for years now as regardless of make they all perform very similar and reliable.
 
personally

Western digital for me - got 4 of them currently and quiet, quick and (touches a large piece of oak!) never once failed.
 
in order of preference:
Samsung
Seagate
Western Digital
Hitachi
Maxtor

all in all. Don't buy Maxtor drives, i've had 3 in the last year, and they've all broke down.
 
I hope you weren't expecting any sort of consensus here? At the moment I'm using Seagate and Maxtor drives with no real complaints about either but if buying new now it would either be the new Seagate 7200.11s or a Western Digital AAKS drive, not because the others aren't good but those two are the fastest of the 'normal' drives. :)
 
Greenlizard0 said:
Wait...wasn't there a poll on this in the not too distant past?
Click to expand...

I think the poll was on the first hard drive failure that people had suffered rather than what was the best since that is highly subjective. From what I remember Hitachi scored reasonably well since they were counted separately from IBM but I can't recall the rest of the results too well although Maxtor didn't come out smelling of roses.

//edit here is the link, Seagate walk it for reliability when you consider they are the biggest manufacturer by a significant amount and bought a major rival (Maxtor) without too much hassle. :)
 
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western digital without question, i have many old ide drives all going strong most are over 6 years old some even 1998 incredible reliability and lifespan.
never liked seagate too noisy for my taste.
 
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In my experience Western Digital are unreliable, I've had 6 fail on me in the last year, and I use maxtor and seagate drives, never had a problem with either, had my 80GB seagate IDE drive for over 5 years.
 
yantorsen said:
In my experience Western Digital are unreliable, I've had 6 fail on me in the last year, and I use maxtor and seagate drives, never had a problem with either, had my 80GB seagate IDE drive for over 5 years.
Click to expand...

Hmm..have you been buying the WD drives from the same seller? Sometimes it's possible they have been given a terrible batch.
 
As a slight aside, but pertinent to the thread... every Dell guy who has turned up at my place has said his preferred drive is Seagate & hates Maxtors. And the tech who runs our offsite backup only uses Seagates too. Last time he was onsite I had some crack, he said he would only use the 500GBs for his SANs until he was confident to start using the 750+ (fwiw)
 
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